New Game & the Satisfaction that's Come from It

I have been working on a children's game, aimed at 5 year olds and up. It's a cooperative game where the players are working toward completely building a temple. It's turned out to be pretty basic, but I think that's important because younger children will be playing it. Anyway, they roll dice and collect "resources" that are then used to "build" parts of a temple. Once they have all the parts they can put them all together and voila! a TEMPLE!!

I got a good prototype put together and Sunday morning before church (we go at 11:00 am) my kids played through it once. My three oldest played (a 7 year old, 5 year old, and 4 year old). The four year old had a hard time understanding that the three of them were playing together on a team. He liked collecting the pennies (which represent tithing) and always commented about how he had more than his sisters. The older two grasped the whole idea and could play through quite easily. They, in fact, helped the four year old several times with his rolls and whatnot.

The best part of the whole thing was that they were totally enjoying themselves! They played for about 30 minutes and were loving their time together. They were working toward a common goal and no one (well our four year old got a little distracted a few times) complained about playing or got tired of it and moved on to something else. It was very satisfying to hear them working together and having a good time playing a game that they could play together without much supervision from my wife and I (we were working on getting the other two ready). All I can say is that it was very satisfying. I was very happy, and still am.