Stronghold

I think Lyddie is finally moving on from The Sims, as she has now discovered...



- which is a different kind of game altogether. It's meant to be a strategy game, but she's not using the combat scenarios - just the economic freeplay option. So there's no enemy and no fighting. It's all about town-building, the way she's currently playing it.

So first there's a bit of reading and typing required in the intro, and you choose a name for yourself and select the kind of scenery you'd like for your little people. The game begins, and you have to site your castle keep, your stockpile and your granary. Then you have to get on with providing enough resources to keep people happy. Unhappy people leave the town and once they start going the place can empty pretty quickly!

You are provided with a very limited amount of the basics at the start, but once they're used up - which takes about five minutes - you're on your own. You need wood, stone and sometimes gold for building. So you need to find some trees and some stony land and open some quarries and woodcutting stations and build a market so that you can trade resources for gold.

Your people need houses (for which you need wood) and food - four different kinds, ideally. So you need farms, mills and bakeries. They like a few inns, for which you also need breweries, and churches, which use a lot of stone. And for every job created, you need more housing and food supplies.

Then there's the whole issue of politics. What kind of ruler will you be? If you're benign and you build parks, gardens, statues and maypoles your people will love you. But build too many and they become lazy and their efficiency drops until they start consuming more food than they're producing. When the granary is empty, people leave town. On the other hand, if you're too much of a tyrant your popularity drops and they'll leave town anyway. Tyrants can choose from all kinds of grisly installations of the stocks, guillotine and duckpond variety.

Success in the game invoves taking all of the above into consideration and making the right decisions at the right stages of your township's growth.

Lyddie's doing quite well so far. She was learning about how the market system works last night. I like the way she wants to know what every available option means so that she can keep control of the decision-making process and therefore her learning process. She's picked up the numbers very quickly and now understands how to buy and sell resources and why the prices fluctuate.

Is home ed supposed to be always about building real life tree houses and skipping through the daisies? We do that too. But sometimes it's raining.