Those weighty words jump out at me from the instruction page for a stimulating simulator webgame, ElectroCity. Why?

Though the game is targeted to school students, the idea behind it plus the fact that real-world sustainable living, too, is "easy to play, hard to master," stirred my interest enough to send me reading through the how-to and starting my own town, Coziville.

What's the big idea?

“We recognise the importance of sustainable energy generation, energy efficiency and environmental management. We want to help people think about these subjects laterally, and what better way than to experience them first-hand and see the impacts of your decisions,” says Genesis Energy Chief Executive Murray Jackson, whose company funds ElectroCity.

That is a big idea!

My Review

While definitely not the fast-paced game play you'd expect if you're a veteran of popular city simulator games (partly because, realistically, you start with little money so it's a bit hard to get going), this game does a lot for critical thinking and helping players think about the result of their choices. From the how-to: "You need to balance your city’s growth with its environmental impact. Your citizens need electricity and jobs, but they also love their clean green image. So you get to decide whether that forest should be made into a national park or logged and turned into an aluminum smelter." Sound realistic? It is.

It was my turn to plan family night, and I had a craving for arts & crafts, while I knew my husband would be in the mood for games and competition. Thankfully, I found a great combo in the Puzzle People Game!

I got the idea for Puzzle People from Scrumdilly-do's Boredom Busters: Crazy Creatures post. You can follow her thorough & colorful how-to there; basically, you want to:

1. Line up index cards (we did 3) and draw one character across the three: head, body, and legs/feet. It's okay if it's not humanoid, so long as it can fit across the cards.
2. We then wrote "head" "body" and "feet" on the back sides, but won't do this next time - see below.
3. Mix up the cards.
4. Make up games to play with them! Use your imagination, use her ideas, or try mine, below.
5. Keep 'em for more fun later - we used a simple plastic zip-top bag.

Our Games

Game #1. Story Telling:
After separately drawing our characters, we introduced each with a little (funny) story. The body (middle card) in the photo above, for example, is a young chef who loves cooking, mixing, and his fun checkered pants.

Game #2. Crazy People:
We mixed up the heads in one stack, bodies in one stack, and feet in one stack, all upsidedown. Because we could tell by handwriting what was what, we dealt them out rather than choosing cards (next time we'll leave off the backs). We each had one minute to come up with a name for the newly-created person, along with a story about why they look the way they do.

Game #3. Build-a-Person: We shuffled all the cards together and dealt 5 to each player. The goal was to get a complete, matching, head-body-feet character.
We held our cards so only we could see them and, in "Go Fish" fashion, asked, "Do you have a _____?" Since we not kids, asking "Do you have a bee," "Do you have a car," etc. would be too easy, so we could only ask for body parts.
"Do you have a head? Body? Feet?" If the player had any, they had to pick one and give it to you. If they didn't have one, you drew one from the top of the card pile. Either way, you always ended your turn by discarding one card to the bottom of the draw pile so that your hand ended back up with 5 cards.
The winner, of course, is whoever first puts together a complete, matching person!
This was a fun, silly, game since you didn't have a lot of control over what you got, and you had crazy looking people in your hand the whole game.

...and you?

Share links or ideas in the comments section with other games you get to make & then play. You can also upload Puzzle People photos to the flickr group!