Hoot Owl Hoot

My daughter has been on a mission to have some of the games we play made tactile so she can play them independently without any help from us.   Sometimes this is easy and some games lend themselves to straightforward modification.   Other games are more challenging or in some cases would be hard to pull off.  For instance, I could add velcro to the cells on a Scrabble board and tiles so words entered onto the playing field would remain in place as she feels over the board to see what has been played, but it would be hard to also indicate which cells had additional information like double word or triple letter.

Today I worked on Hoot Owl Hoot, a game by the company Peaceable Kingdom.   Their games feature a different strategy than most in that all players work together cooperatively, playing against the game itself.   In this game, there are six owls who are trying to get to from the outermost point in the spiral (square spaces) to the center where the nest is.  Gameplay is simple: each person picks a card (not shown) that has a color on it and then moves an owl to the next available of that color towards the center.

There are strategies to the game such as moving one owl over other owls, effectively taking a larger leap forward, when other owls are occupying the color you drew.  Which owl you move forward in different situations helps you get to the center more quickly.   The goal is to get all six owls to the center before the sun comes up.  To the left of the playing field is the sun.   At the start of the game it's night but every sun card you draw moves the sun token one step closer to rising.   If the sun comes up before all the owls are in the nest, the team loses.

To make the game tactile, I had to come up with six textures my daughter could discern and also add a way to keep the owls and sun in place so when she feels over the board to find the next red space or to locate the sun to move it to the next slot, she doesn't disrupt the pieces.

I found six different textures in varying materials that I thought my daughter could tell apart easily.   I was also able to match the colors to the original game colors, but since I was covering up the circles both on the board as well as the cards, it didn't much matter—the game was transitioning from one based on color to one of texture.   The picture is mid-game with the owls part-way home.  On a construction front, I got lucky, having a circle punch that exactly matched the circles on the board, which made it easy to match the additions to the original layout of the game.  I finished by adding a bit of velcro on the spaces and owls helped them easily stay in place,

When I was done, my daughter, Blake, and I sat down to play.   Blake and I did nothing, letting her set up the game and manage the moving of pieces and reading of cards all by herself.  And it worked.   She could tell the difference in textures immediately.   She wanted to know what color each texture was but when I mentioned we didn't even have to talk in terms of colors she got into the idea and we started saying things like, "I drew a glitter card" or "I got a fuzzy card, we can jump one of the owls over the others now!"  She did humor us by also saying the colors, which is interesting because they mean nothing to her.   She likes colors a lot though and I think it's important to her to talk about colors as it doesn't emphasize her blindness as much.

Not only could my daughter completely play the game unassisted, but she was also quick at it, hands flying around the board, looking for the next available location of that texture.   The modifications worked and she was just as happy as I was that she was leading the game.

She has many other games she wants me to make tactile for her.   Now that the craft room reorganization is nearing completion, I've got the time and space to work on projects like these for her.

The Big Boy Update:  I put my proverbial foot down.   I told my son and husband I'd had enough of the delays and today was the day the LEGOs, after close to four months of occupancy, would be leaving the dining room table for good.   The table had been covered and stacked for a long time and they had been slowly getting things in order and removed from the room since my son had waned in his LEGO interest a long time back.   The project was low to no priority on their part though.   We still have a display model of an X-Wing Fighter from Star Wars as our centerpiece, but the table can now be used for other things, like eating on it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  After playing a game of Hoot Owl Hoot with my daughter and Blake, I came into the craft room to write this blog post on my currently-relocated computer which is residing in here while I work on organizing things.   My daughter came in moments later after starting a second game with Blake.  She had one of the six owl game tokens in her hands and told me, "Momma, for some reason this owl is special.   Can we put a bumblebee sticker on him?"  I got her the wooden three-dimensional bumblebee sticker and she headed back to finish the game with Blake.