Found a pretty cool board game at a neighborhood yard sale (the second best place to find great old games no one knows about anymore--thrift stores are still the best): Lionheart from Parker Brothers.

I had a friend back in my teaching days that was into historical tabletop gaming in a big way. That's where people spend thousands of dollars and countless hours over many years buying and hand-painting small, historically accurate lead replicas of soldiers, archers, artillery and the like from whatever their favorite historical wars are--then they line them up on giant tables decorated with scale-sized trees, grass, hills, rivers, bridges, buildings and more and reenact historical battles, or make up their own new conflicts.

I could never justify the time or expense of getting so involved in this hobby, but I did play a few engagements with my friend and had a surpringly good time getting pummelled.

Lionheart is a much-simplified version of these sprawling, unweildy, multi-hour games. The battlefield is the size of a normal board game. The units are composed of 1 to 4 plastic soldiers, no meticulous hand-painting required. Players put on the indicated number of soldiers for each type of unit: 1 king, 2 knights, 4 archers or 4 foot soldiers per square base. These units are arranged in a face-off, and the battle begins. First to kill the king or his oppoenents entire army wins.

It plays pretty fast and the hits and loses are simply calculated with the included dice, making for a fun game that I still get pummelled at when playing my son.

There are even mercenaries and heavy soldiers I have yet to experiment with to add extra elements of battlefield realism to the game. I'm looking forward to discovering how they change the game.

I'm sure it's out of print (so many of the good games are), but you can no doubt find it out on the internet somewhere if you want it. I recommend you do so if you like war games from chess to Risk. It's lighter and quicker than those, but a good time and playable for even younger kids.

I do so love thrift stores. I found another great game at my favorite Tampa thrift store: Second Image on Kennedy.

Quoridor is a strategy game played on a 9 x 9 space wooden board. The object of the game is to get your single pawn from its starting position at the center of your home row across the board to your opponent's home row.

The challenge of the game comes from the fact that each player has 10 walls, each able to cut off movement between any two pairs of spaces. Players either move their pawns or place a wall on the board. Walls can either be placed so they impede an opponent's movement or aid that of the player placing them.

It's a variation on a build-a-board game in that the static board is changed with the placement of every wall, so the field of play is ever-changing, and no two games ever end up being played on the same field.

A quick Google search brings up a few games from $23 to $30, though I'm sure you can find it for less--Second Image came through for me with a can't-beat-it $2 price tag.

So keep checking those thrift stores--they're a great place to find fun games to play between your duels in the Nature Dome!

Check out some great pics of Quoridor on BoardGames.com: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/624 

As great as Nature Dome is, it's not the only great game out there . . . or the only game that gets played in my house.

One of the key things that makes a game great in my eyes, though, is price. As the song says (sort of), I work hard for my money, so I'm careful about where I spend it. There are some really cool games out there for $30, $40 and much more, but I'm not likely to check them out for the simple reason that I can't afford them.

Plus, I don't often have multiple hours to spend playing games that many of those high-priced options require.

So, I tend to go for cheap and quick (at least under an hour) in my game choices.

At about $4 and as little as 10 to 15 minutes to play, Toss Up! was an easy choice for me.

The game is available at Target, and is well worth the minimal investment.

The game itself is very easy to learn and play, even for the youngest players. It consists of 10 dice with red, yellow and green sides. Each player starts their turn rolling all ten dice. Green sides are points and are set aside. Reds and yellows get rolled again. Players keep rolling and accumulating points for as long as they want (starting over with 10 dice once they've all come up green), and can stop at any time.

This way, points can add up quickly. But, if on any roll the player rolls any number of reds with no greens at all, the player's turn ends and they lose all the points they've accumulated in that turn.

This makes each roll with fewer dice more risky than the last, and it really ratchets up the tension (especially for younger players) as the points they are risking on a given roll add up.

It's fast and fun and an instant hit with everyone I've played with. And it's definitely worth the $4 investment at your local Target--after you've order your Nature Dome deck, of course!

I got the gaming thrill of my life today!

I stopped off at an area Goodwill to look for cowboy clothes (more on that in a future blog) and instead found a long-lost piece of my childhood--tucked away amongst many other interesting titles on the several shelves of board games they had at the back of the very clean and nicely laid out store (this was the Goodwill on the St. Petersburg side of the Gandy Bridge, right next to Derby Lane, for any locals that want to check it out).

To my great surprise and giddy delight, there was Lost Treasure, a Parker Brothers game from 1982, as it turns out, and from a special place in my childhood. This is a game that I have vivid memories of playing with my parents as a child of maybe 9 or 10, and one that I had even mentioned to my own children (7 and 11) as one I would love to find again. 

To my even greater delight, I found that the electronic console that is central to the game still worked, so I headed home with my old game and a new 9-volt battery and put it to the test.

Imagine my joy to discover that the game was every bit as fun as I remembered!

In the game, you use the simple-to-operate, battery-powered console to search the board's grid of ocean and islands for sunken treasure. As you and your opponents strategically narrow down the search area, you move your ships across the water to be the first to dive for either sunken gold or silver.

Once you've located the appropriate 9-square area in which to find the treasure, you use the console as a dive gauge as you send your diver down into the depths to retrieve the booty. You have to keep an eye on your LED air-supply meter as you do so--take too long under water and you run out of air and drop whatever treasure you may have found back down to the ocean floor.

In the meantime, opponents can come searching and diving for the same treasure you are after, or another on the board. Once you get your treasure onboard, it's off to the nearest port to cash your treasure chests in for money before your opponents have a chance to pirate your vessel and steal your hard-earned gains.

The first person to a million dollars of treasure wins the game.

This is a great family game. It's recommended for ages 8 and up, but would easily be accessible to many younger kids. It takes planning, strategy and anticipation of your opponents' intentions, motives and moves. And listening to the simple tones of your imaginary diver descending after treasure, finding it (or not) and rushing to the surface before running out of air is thrilling far out of scale of the 1982 technology.

If you can find this game online, and particularly if you have kids in the recommended age range, I strongly recommend checking it out—as I write, there are several available on eBay at prices ranging from $0.99 to $84.