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A SWEET TREAT
By Jordan Cohen
WARREN
Candy Crush may be an obsession with some of the older crowd, but for the very young, the sweet game of choice has to be Candy Land, the classic children’s board game where players move markers on colorful squares to try to rescue King Kandy.
At the Warren Trumbull Public Library on Saturday, children moved themselves instead of markers on a pathway of 100 colorful felt squares to win prizes of candy. They appeared to be more concerned about winning the sweets than rescuing the king.
“I want to play again,” said Alina Miller, a bright-eyed Warren 5-year-old sporting a Hello Kitty jersey. She cheerfully moved from square to square under the tutelage of her grandfather and smiled broadly as she picked up more pieces of candy.
“You don’t have to know how to read to play, so it’s all inclusive,” said Audrey Hogan, youth services librarian.
The pathway was situated alongside hand-made cardboard models of some of the game figures such as Lord Licorice, Princess Lolly and Queen Frostine. The young players matched the squares to the color-coded cards in a deck that Hogan gave them.
“Each deck is different and in a random order, like the game,” Hogan said.
Susan Luta brought her son Lincoln Gayhart, 7, and stepdaughter Dashana Thomas, 10, to try their luck with the squares. She persuaded her older son Austin, 14, to participate even though he is significantly older than the other players.
“I thought, ‘Oh great,’” said Austin, who reluctantly agreed to his mother’s request.
“He’s a good sport about it,” she said. “He does a lot of volunteer work.”
His younger brother said he loves to read and come to the library. “I read 500 books last year,” said Lincoln, who is a second-grader. The child, dressed in a camouflage shirt and jeans, said his all-time favorite is “The Headless Horseman.”
The idea behind the live game, which the library introduced in 2012, is to keep children interested in reading in general and the library in particular. For parents such as Laurie Faulk of Warren, the interest is already there. She had brought her daughters Brigid, 9, and Jane, 5, to borrow some books.
“We didn’t know this was going on,” she said. Her daughters quickly took advantage by winning licorice sticks and Skittles.
Jacob Mansfield, a 6-year-old from Warren, intently matched the colors in the deck to the squares on the floor as his father, Colin, walked along. “He wanted to make sure he could tell the difference between blue and purple,” the boy’s father said. When Jacob got to the final square with “Winner” on it, he raised his arms in victory.
Like so many of the other children, he just had to play again.