Getting my kids to help with the household chores gets a little more difficult every year. Now, I found this great, fun site that just  might get my gaming-oriented children involved – willingly! This might also be good for small companies, college (or post-college) roommates, and people who just like to have fun or are competitive in all areas of their life.

Chore Wars

http://www.chorewars.com

In their own words, “Chore Wars lets you claim experience points for household chores. By getting other people in your house or workplace to sign up to the site, you can assign experience point rewards to individual tasks and chores, and see how quickly each of you levels up….Experience points are tracked both as weekly high-score charts, and as ongoing character sheets – every time you rack up 200 XP of chores, your character gains a “level”, and their class changes to match the type of chores that they’ve been doing.”

I’ve setup our family’s site and I’m ready to venture forth with the “Adventures in the Land of The Babcock Bear Cave“. (I named our group ‘The Babcock Bear Cave’ therefore we’re having Adventures in the Land of Our Home.) I’ve chosen the female sorcerer for my “character” and I’m the Dungeon Master of our brave party. As Dungeon Master, I get to select the adventures that are available, decide whether or not the kids actually get their points and other “in-charge” stuff.

Now that we have an account, I need to set up the “adventures” for my kids to select and then get them their own accounts. Regarding adventures: you can select from some of their pre-set adventures or create your own. For pre-set and created adventures, you can select XP points (that’s experience for you non-gamer types), stat bonuses, and treasure for completion. You can also set up monsters for the adventure! As the Dungeon Master, I’ll also be selecting real-world rewards for their digital XP and/or treasure – something like every 200 gold = $10 real world money.

As an old D&D gamer I’m super excited about this find – I think is really going to be fun for me and for the boys! 🙂

» Read a lot more here about how to set up and use this site: http://www.chorewars.com/help.php

Update to come once we’ve used it for a while…

Clean or Consequences

Not sure your family is quite ready to have an online gaming experience around the household chores? Maybe your kids aren’t old enough or they’re not into role-play gaming (yet). Check out my old mommy-blog and a game I called “Clean or Consequences“.

The premise is similar to Chore Wars except the rewards and consequences are more immediate and IRL, not just digital (IRL = In Real Life for you non-digital people). The chores, rewards and consequences can all be made age-appropriate, so it can work for kids from 4 to 10 (my boys were definitely “over it” after our Spring Break week so they were at the top of the age range when I implemented it).

Sample Day in Clean or Consequences

Would love to know if anyone uses either of these clean-gaming options and their results. Here’s to cleaner houses, helpful kids and happier moms!

XO – T.