What My Family Is Watching, Playing, and Reading

A world of camper vans, endless UNO, being brave at the movie theater, and more.

When Krypto is not on screen, I promise that your children will be asking “Where is Krypto?” until the dog finally appears again 20 minutes later.

I first published one of these columns back in January, intending for this to be a monthly occurrence where we could all share what’s dominating our families, but…well, life happens. It also means a lot of life has happened, so let’s catch up, shall we?

Oh, also. I’ll write about this again before it happens, but in early August we’re taking our first international family trip to London and Paris. We’ll be gone for nearly two weeks, and it’s also going to be the longest flight my children will have been on in a minute and the longest flight my wife’s ever been on. We’re spending a few days in London before more than a week in Paris. I need to start prepping the iPads, so if you have any recommendations on how you handle a long flight, I’m happy for the advice.

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What My Family Is Playing

• Camper Van: Make It Home (Steam)

Part of our bedtime routine with the kids is scrolling TikTok and watching a handful of funny videos. They don’t have TikTok on their devices, and because I rarely spend time on TikTok outside of watching it with my kids, it has, in a sense, become theirs.

A natural consequence is a weird recommendation algorithm that’s a mixture of kids hurting themselves in funny ways, ASMR videos that involve slime or other objects with strange textures, and more recently, really involved tour videos of camper vans.

The videos all follow a similar format. There’s no talking and follows the popular “routine” format. You’re watching “a day in the life,” within the constraints of a person eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom in and around a camper van and/or another tiny vehicle where you’ve shoved all the function of a house into a small space.

Given that, when I showed my eight-year-old a trailer for Camper Van: Make It Home, it was clear I’d made a mistake, because she started asking me “Dad, is it out?” every day for months. The game came out last month on Steam, but my daughter does not like using my Steam Deck and the controller interface isn’t great, so our enthusiasm was short lived and punted towards the Switch release that is coming later this year.

The videos, however, have not stopped. I’m slowly losing it.

• UNO: Arcade Edition (Apple Arcade)

If there is one consistent card game played in the house, it’s UNO. (If it’s not UNO, it’s Go Shark, a variation on Go Fish that my wife purchased some time ago because she’s shark obsessed.) Even better than normal UNO is UNO with extremely big cards, a variant we’ve seen a few times at different bars but I keep forgetting to buy for home.

UNO is nice because there is winning, there’s losing, and there’s a lot of randomness.

There is skill involved, especially towards the end game and the psychological manipulation that can give you an edge with a few cards left in your hand, but what’s nice about UNO is that, generally speaking, anyone can win, including both the five-year-old and the eight-year-old. It happens naturally, not because we’re giving up!

It’s why I recommend Apple Arcade’s UNO: Arcade Edition. It’s a straightforward UNO that works well in a digital format. There’s very little that’s flashy about it. The bummer is that you have to be online for multiplayer, there’s no way for a collection of iPhones and iPad to locally have their own game going. But once you’re in, it was a fun way to pass the time with a game that we were already familiar with, and as an extra kick, the kids feel special holding a giant tablet where they’re playing the game. 

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What My Family Is Watching

• Superman (Theaters)

My wife and I had planned to take a date night for James Gunn’s (terrific) Superman. A Troma guy doing Superman? Movies are where my wife and I end up for most date nights. We have a decent projector setup at home for big movies, but it’s still nice to get out, even if our local AMC could use a massive upgrade in just about every way.

When I told my children mom and dad were going to the movies while they slept at grandma’s, they asked what movie we were going to see. They often assume (correctly) we’re seeing something scary. In this case, we were seeing Superman, which they’d seen all the trailers for and showed enough interest in that I figured we’d watch it with them later in the year. Both quickly protested at the idea that mom and dad were seeing the movie without them, but I worried Superman would prove too intense.