Skill Games

You could do worse than to be stranded on a desert island with Dale Le Fevre. I've no idea what his hunter-gatherer skills are, but the man knows hundreds of games, for Milton-Bradley's sake. "Half the Feet," "Frisbee Volleyball," "Hyperspace," "Scoot and Spell," these are just a handful of the 14 new games profiled in Le Fevre's latest compilation Skill Games (see also Cooperative Group Games in VL-9/97). Sporting better cinematography than earlier efforts, Skill Games still sticks to the basic format: learning once removed; i.e., viewers watch Le Fevre teaching the games to school kids, who then play the game--some of which looked fun. "Scoot and Spell" pits teams against one another in a race to collect cut-out letters and be the first to spell a word (the winner was "tall," though I heard another team yell out--I think--"we got ‘booze'!"). Other games seemed more like exercises. "Musical Squares," for instance, is played like musical chairs only all the players can touch a square at the same time--so no one's ever out. I'm sorry, but a non-competitive game is an oxymoron. (If I were to play a game of horseshoes with one of my upstate New York cousins, he or she would not say, "let me give you a small handicap, you being a writer and all"; no, he or she would say "I'm gonna have to open up a can of whup ass.") Overall, however, I think there are enough useful games for elementary kids here to recommend this for schools. Aud: K, E, I. (R. Pitman)