My youngest is currently obsessed with Spider-Man.
And not just Peter Parker Spider-Man. He loves Miles. He loves Gwen. He loves the older cartoons, Spidey and His Amazing Friends, and every live-action version we decide is appropriate for a four-year-old, which is obviously a very edited selection.
Basically, if the character wears a mask and shoots webs, he is interested.
We are not a completely screen-free family. Sometimes Spidey saves the city, and sometimes Spidey gives me enough time to make dinner without someone hanging from the furniture. Both are valuable public services.
But I have been trying to bring more board games into the house so we have easy activities that do not automatically involve turning on a television or tablet.
Our oldest is reaching the age where he can understand more traditional games, but our youngest is still a little too young for regular Yahtzee. He can roll the dice. He can enthusiastically throw the dice across the room. He can announce that he won before anyone has explained the rules. The actual scoring portion is where things begin to fall apart.
Then I found Spidey and His Amazing Friends Yahtzee Jr., which combines something he already loves with a game simple enough for him to actually play. Instead of matching numbers, players roll dice featuring Spidey characters and match them to the pictures on the scoreboard. Easy enough for him to understand and simple enough for me to explain and not care if we play wrong the three times.
He rolls the dice, finds the matching characters and places his scoring tokens on the board. The character pictures include favorites such as Spidey, Miles Morales and Ghost-Spider, so he is immediately invested in what he rolls.
He needs a little help, especially when we are learning a new rule, but I am not essentially playing the entire game for him while he wanders away to find a snack. I have learned that telling a four-year-old to stop watching Spider-Man is much easier when the alternative also contains Spider-Man.
We can bring it out after dinner, on a rainy afternoon or during that strange stretch of time when it is too early for bed but everyone has already run out of good decisions. It is also helping him practice taking turns and accepting that other people occasionally win.
We are still working on that second part.
Would I Recommend Spidey Yahtzee Jr.?
For a preschooler who already loves the Spider-Verse, absolutely.
The rounds are manageable, the rules are simple and the character matching keeps his attention. It feels like a real family game rather than something made only to occupy a toddler for three minutes.
Most importantly, he asks to play it.
And for at least a little while, nobody is asking me to find a specific episode where Rhino smashes through a wall. That alone feels like a win.
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