The reason for this is I now have a fairly significant collection of DDM that I bought for playing D&D, not for the mini’s game.  And I have one son who enjoys chess and RTS’s like Supreme Command, Warcraft 3, Command and Conquer, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 etc.  He’s six by the way.  When he was 3 or so he’d sit on my lap and watch me play and by 4 he was building his own theme parks and dominating the world.  I also have a pair of twins who are 4 years old who enjoy playing World of Warcraft, (I run a private server for them) and the like.

Why not combine the two?  The kids and the mini’s that is.  Because only my 6 year old can really read well (and he can read very well) I’m not using any of the card data.  Our DDM rules are simple, the mini’s they choose can move 6 if they’re humanoid and not undead, 5 if they’re bugs, 4 if they’re undead. Â  The ranged characters have a range of 10. Â  For attacks we use d6, I have some big craps dice.  A ranged character can hit on a 6, melee can hit on a 5-6.  All characters are treated as minions, one hit and they’re dead.

My oldest would probably not have any problem with powers, defenses, and the like but the twins are still not ready for that level game mechanics.

We split up into two groups of two and each get 2 – 4 mini’s. Â  Other than that we use the standard terrain rules, walls, difficult terrain, victory points etc. Â  Victory areas are worth 1 point per turn, a kill is worth 1 point.

So far they’ve killed me off first and the group I’m in has lost every time. 

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Anyway if you have children and you’ll have to classify that one yourself then after a lot of due diligence (and I’ve been doing level III IT for over a decade now) I’ve settled on Foxy Filter as my filter for the children. The only real way to filter the internet is to block everything and allow only what you want and Foxy Filter does that for me. I can wild card the black list “*” and add whatever I want to the white list and be done with it. It can also, and does a pretty good job of, block banner ads based on known ad servers, ad sizes and some kind of algorithm to check for them. So the flash sites that the kids go to to play ‘mini games’ are a lot nicer to browse and don’t include a lot of craptastic stuff that kids don’t need.

Because it’s a white list that automatically blocks most exploits including iframe and most spyware and adware because the computer is otherwise locked down and nothing can get out but Internet Explorer and Firefox and since those only go where I want them to that takes the spyware and adware servers out of the loop.

It’s easy to install, you can install it on each computer, we have three kids, or just install it on a handy server (or just one of your kids computers if you’re not a computeraphile) and then point the others to use that computer to get to the internet. This lets you only have to administer the proxy in one location. Which is a bonus for multiple computer access.

Now this is NOT a secure method of doing things unless you’re a bit in the know and won’t block older kids. For that you’d have to have a lockdown policy at your router or if you’re a real geek at your edge firewall that blocks all internet access except from your proxy server and that would have to be locked down as well otherwise the kids will just change the proxy settings. Of course you can lock down Internet Explorer through group policy or registry edits and make sure your kids are regular users and not administrators so that’s quite possible to do but that won’t help for Opera or Firefox or whatever.

But for a pair of 4 year olds and a six year old, this is quite suitable.

Anyway, two thumbs up Foxy Filter, if you’re looking for a free way to help keep your kids from the bad things on the web you can do far far worse.