Playing Haligali with a 3 year old

Haligali is quite an old game, we used to play from time to time. The game itself is based on reflexes and ability to count quickly, similar to games like set, dobble or jungle-speed.

Rules look like this:

• Everybody starts with a large deck of cards in front of them
• Each card contain one to five pieces of the same fruit (banana, lemon, strawbery or plum)
• there is a small ringing-bell (image) in the reach of every player
• all the players flip the card from their draw decks at once
• if there isn’t 5 pieces of the same fruit on the cards together, all players put their card into their personal discard-piles
• if there are 5 pieces of the same fruit total, the player who notices and first rings the bell takes all of the discard piles and shuffles them into her deck
• if the player rings the bell in error, she has to give each other player one card
• last player with cards in the deck wins

We have assumed, that quick counting is not one of our Elen’s strong suits just yet, even though she manages to count to five. Therefore we change the relevant rule from “5 pieces of the same fruit together” to “at least two players have same type of fruit”. But even everyone was quick with their numbers, with just three players the set didn’t come often enough and the game felt at the same time both stressful and boring.

With waiting just for the same symbol, it became simple enough and there is still some tension with 2 or 3 players.

So how does it look like when we are playing?

This was probably the best suited game/mod that we played together at that time. Trying to hit the bell first is fun, Elen celebrates even when somebody else takes the cards, and if I time my losses correctly, we can play for over 30 minutes. We usually play just in two, but it still is fun when the three of us are together at the table (well, on the carpet, really). Only drawback with playing with 3 is, that with or simplified rules, the bell gets triggered a bit too often. With more than 3 players we will need to wait for Elen to learn to count to 5 properly.

To conclude, this is an awesome game for even small children and I can’t wait for her to learn to count to five already, so that we can play the full version. I do assume other games in this genre might work as well, like Dobble (I know they make variants for small kids) or Set or maybe even Jungle Speed.

As somebody who really likes set-theory, I would like to try playing Set with her next. I remember playing that game in highschool, and that uncovering the correct tripplet (if I remember correctly) was really satisfying, especially after you saw the expression of “How comes I did not see that” on the faces of your fellow players.

note: three years later, Elen bought herself a dobble set, after she played it with her classmate, deciding it s worth to spend most of her allowance money she saved up to that point. We still do play with the bell from Haligali from time to time.