Farm Fresh Adventures: Brain Blox Fun Family Chess~ Making Chess "Easy Peasy" to Learn! {Product Review}

BRAIN BLOX Fun Family Chess ~ Product Review

Chess. When we first got married, I didn’t realize that my husband had played in the chess club. We tried playing together, but I just didn’t have the critical thinking skills to play…but really it was more that I could NEVER remember which piece was able to move where or how! Chess is a game that I really have been wanting to introduce to my kids—especially my math and critical thinking game lover—but it’s not really my forte. Enter our review of the Brain Blox Fun Family Chess set from Brain Blox. Claiming to be the “easy-peasy way to learn chess”, I really wondered if this was the answer to my how-do-i-teach-them-chess dilemma!

About the Product

Brain Blox Fun Family Chess is a very fun learn-as-you-play game designed to teach anyone from age 5-105 how to play chess. Chess is a great game for the mind, as it increases skills in so many areas
like concentration, problem-solving, reading, and memory. The biggest challenge for many beginners is simply HOW do you get started? The game of chess can be tricky to tackle and confusing in many ways. Brain Blox decided to address the problem with creating Fun Family Chess. Fun Family Chess breaks the game of chess down into basic bite-sized pieces.

Brain Blox Fun Family Chess includes a folding wooden chessboard, 32 wooden chess pieces in a soft pouch, a full-color chess book, 2 reference cards, and the chess cube. The chess book is the direction manual and shows how to start with the Fun Family Chess. The directions also include people who might learn better by watching, offering a link to watch the directions too.

Once the Fun Family Chess game has been learned, the book includes information for learning how to play standard chess as well—a natural progression after spending time with Fun Family Chess.

Our Thoughts on the Product

My oldest wasn’t interested in this product at all, but my youngest son was eager to start. We were both surprised at how fancy the set seemed with the velvet interior of the wooden playing board, and the little velvety pouches for the pieces. Everything about this set is of high quality!

He read through the directions and we got started immediately. The basic tenants of Fun Family Chess are that you learn how to move the pieces by themselves until you know them backward and forwards. The game board is marked with the icons so that it is easy to get set up. Using the reference cards, you will never forget how the pieces can move on the board.

Set up and ready to go!

The rules are simple:
Roll the chess cube. Match the colored symbol on the cube to the same color symbol on the reference card. Move based on the card's instructions for the piece. It will tell you HOW each chess piece can move--you must move if you can. If you cannot move because you don't have the piece any longer or the movement is blocked by other pieces, you roll again! Rolling a Star means that you get to move any piece you must! If your piece lands on top of your opponent's piece, you stop on that square and take their piece off the board. Winning Fun Family chess is done by capturing the other player's king!

Mid-game

By playing the game in this manner, each player gets very very familiar with how the pieces can move on the board, and plotting and planning future moves! It is this very goal that sets you up for more successful play in standard chess!

It is possible to only use this set for Fun Family Chess--especially if your children are younger. We played and played Fun Family Chess again (and no, I didn't win most of the games! LOL) and again before we decided to try standard chess. I loved that the booklet included with the set teaches how to move forward in learning standard chess. Only a few additional rules added--so we were ready to go! We haven't yet played a full standard chess game, as we keep getting interrupted. But we definitely want to try it now that we've learned the basic moves of the pieces.

One of our standard chess attempts!

My husband and anyone who has seen this set has been amazed at the quality of the material and the way that it goes about teaching chess. My mom isn't a big chess fan, but even she said she would be willing to attempt learning the Fun Family Chess version herself. I think the appeal of the game is that it takes the "how on earth do I move this piece?" problem from the equation! Even the little booklet included teaches the game using fun little captions on the game snapshots and translates chess terms into "plain English".

A basic discussion on how things will change for standard chess

We totally give this product two thumbs up, and I expect it will be coming out quite regularly. I can't wait to actually play a full game of standard chess to see how we do!

If you want to see a little bit more about the game, make sure you watch this video explaining "What Is Fun Family Chess?"

Want to Know More?

For the last several weeks, we've been enjoying learning how to play Fun Family Chess from Brain Blox to prepare ourselves for standard chess. You have seen how much we've enjoyed this game--now I encourage you to visit other crew members to discover their thoughts on this family-friendly game!