Serpentiles from Thinkfun

Serpentiles is an awesome path finding logic game from Thinkfun.  We've had the game for years, and it's one of our favorites!

Serpentiles comes with 12 rectangular tiles and 7 square tiles, a rule booklet, a deck of 40 challenge cards and a handy-dandy card holder.

It also comes with a storage bag to keep all your pieces together.

To begin the game, you pick a challenge card and select the required tiles.  This first challenge is the easiest with only three tiles to use (see above photo).  The object of Serpentiles is to find a path that creates a complete loop, while making sure not to mix any of the blue and green lines together.  There are no other rules, so this is a nice and straightforward game.

Here's another example of a completed challenge.  There's one straight blue line and one curvy green line which together form a continuous loop.

And the backs of the cards show the answers.  One small hint if you get stuck:  Double check your tiles.  The "S" shaped tiles go in two different directions, and it is easy to pick up the wrong one!

Serpentiles is a great little game for some quiet time fun for your kids.  Thinkfun recommends 8 to adult, but younger kids would be able to solve many of these challenges on their own.  The tiles would also be fun to play with and maybe build roads for small vehicles!

I think this would also make a great learning center activity for classrooms.  There aren't too many pieces to keep track of and the deck holder makes it easy to display the challenges while in play and easy to clean up the cards when finished.  Having so very few rules also makes this game easy to learn!  The rule book shows how to play in several simple steps.

Thinkfun offers an additional set of 16 challenges that you can download from their website for free.  That makes a total of 56 challenges for you and your kids to sink your teeth into (or fangs...since they are SERPENTiles!)