YOU and the Argonauts game
I love mythology, and so now my kids do as well. Recently I sat down and started telling them the Jason & the Argonauts story (the Argonautika) at bedtime. They fell in love with the same things I had: the journey, the quest, and the team full of people with amazing powers, both mortal and divine. I still stand by the Argonautika as the best story of all time.
So naturally I made my son a cardboard Argo to play with, which he immediately filled with such heroes as She-Ra, Mr. Incredible and Shrek (he confuses genres sometimes, so what.)
I then made a boardgame to play with my six-year-old daughter (and my son for when he's a bit more tolerant of things like rules).
The Argonauts board game is simple to understand, but complex in its possibilities. All you do is spin or roll dice to move around the board, then draw cards when you land on a red space. The cards can be good or bad - sometimes it's a benefit you find, but often it's a monster attack, or a sea storm, or a broken ship or sick crew. The key is, you also start the game with a few Argonauts, drawn randomly from a pile of 16. Each Argonaut has different skills that you can apply in different ways. So, you can defeat the monsters and obstacles you run across using your various Argonauts' abilities - or just by getting lucky and rolling the dice well. If you can't, you lose turns, letting the other place get closer to the Fleece. There are also a few spots where you can pick up boons from gods and other myth characters like Athena, Hera, Chiron the Centaur, Phineus the blind seer, and of course, Medea.
The first player to pick up the Golden Fleece and get it back to Iolcus safely wins.
Below you can see some Argonaut cards, Event cards, and the Board itself.
