So you’ve had success with your electronic invites and now your house is full of screaming children vomiting peanut butter sandwiches into your DVD player’s disc-tray. Time to settle them all down for a few board games.

But why punish them with complex mental arithmetic when adding up the scores? Sure, you could be generous and give them a calculator to use, but you’d still need pen and paper to write it all down.

So whip out your iPhone and solve the problem by using the EZ Score app. You can keep track of everyone’s score very easily, even having a photo next to each child’s name. For 59 pence (or free for the Lite version that is limited to 3 players) you have become the cool dad with the iPhone who didn’t make his kids practice mathematics when they were supposed to be having fun. Dadgetastic.

I’ll be sharing regular tips on how you can seal wife approval for those special gadgets, and in this first instalment I’m giving you the underlying principal that should influence all of your future gadget purchases – always, always, always make a link to your child.

No matter how tenuous the connection between a gadget and your offspring, you simply must make that link in order to turn the gadget into a Dadget and make it impossible for your wife to say no.  Let me show you how this works:

“Darling, I’ve seen this great game that Henry will absolutely love.  It’s a snakes & ladders shot glass set!”

“Did you say ‘shot glass’?”

“Yeah!  How cool will it be if we can play games with him and get him to eat his mashed up carrots from all these little glasses?!”

“Er, yes, actually that sounds like a great idea.  Buy one now.  And get yourself a new torch while you’re online, too.”

“I love you.”