DW-versary and board games

[liv]

I missed my anniversary of moving to DW – this has been my online home since 3 May 2009, a slightly astonishing 16 years. Anyway, the 3weeks4dreamwidth annual fest is ongoing, and I am not doing any particular posting challenges or anything, but I generally think having more content here is good. Some people don't agree, they really dislike those times in early January and April-May when everybody makes resolutions to post more and the site gets busy. I'm kind of a hypocrite because I love when people commit to posting more frequently or regularly, but I never really do so myself.

But talking about random things when I happen to have time and brain is also useful! Inspired by a discussion in agonyaunt I was interested in people's thoughts about playing board games including both adults and children. When I was a kid my parents pretty much did not play games with us. They followed a parenting philosophy, which I think has some merit, that play is for children, and the less adult supervision and interference the more kids are able to explore and develop. We are four sibs close in age so we could usually find enough people to put together a game without needing parents. In the 1980s there also wasn't a great adult games market, let alone what are now called 'family' games which are specifically designed to be fun and challenging to adults while also accessible to younger children.

We did occasionally play what would now be called party games, things like charades or Pictionary, often repackaged as commercial games with physical components and some kind of scoring mechanism. Many of these were gifts from my uncle; he does have (adult) offspring now but they are a lot younger than us and when we were little he was the childfree fun uncle who preferred to have some kind of structure around spending time with children. But since our uncle was willing to play with us that set an example of playing a game being something adults could occasionally join in with. Similarly my paternal grandmother would often play cards with us, beggar-my-neighbour (which she called 'strip Jack naked') and snap when we were little, later on various forms of competitive solitaire like King's corner, and Pontoon (Blackjack), gambling for matchsticks and learning about probability.

Chess was considered improving and educational, but Mum never really learned and Dad is remarkably terrible at it (one of my earliest memories is of the first time I beat him, aged four, and not because he was letting me win but because his attention drifted and he left his queen exposed), so again, it was mostly a game we played with siblings. My mother's father was a fairly serious chess player but he didn't really know how to adjust his game to play with younger kids, so it was a completely uneven game and not really fun for either party; he died when I was 9 so we never got a chance to play on a more equal footing. The one thing we did play was bridge, weirdly; my mother thought it was socially useful to know how to play, so sent us to an elderly East End Jewish man for lessons. He was a delightful teacher and loved children. But we were really too young for bridge, I'm talking under 10, and our parents were never strong players either, but sometimes we would play a few rubbers treating it more or less as a game of luck, if you got good cards you would win. And Scrabble, from time to time, though that is another game that has the problem that it's very hard for children to give adults a decent game.

My siblings now tell me I was very annoying to play with, since I was the oldest and always wanted to play games where I could leverage my greater experience to win. Which isn't quite true, I don't doubt that I was annoying, but it was more that I wanted to play games with interesting tactics rather than games of pure luck that were mostly just reskinned snakes and ladders or ludo / sorry, especially at an age where my younger siblings were not ready for complex games. I spent a lot of time reading books of games and finding new card and word games for us to play.

As an older teen, I had a close friend who is German and introduced me to Settlers of Catan and that genre of Eurogames a few years before they hit the mass market in the UK. If you're brought up on Monopoly and Game of Life, Settlers is an absolute revelation! And it turned out to unlock entry into nerd societies at uni and as a post-grad; board gaming was my main social life during my PhD, which is unremarkable now but was quite niche in the early 2000s. Now all my partners are gamers, and I lucked into a family where adults do in fact play games with children. Not just board games, but any kind of games.

However, it's sometimes emotionally fraught. The older two are natural gamers and have always been happy to play with adults, including being comfortable with fairly complex games from an early age. But it was always much more difficult with A; he likes games in some ways, but also, especially when he was younger, found a lot of the meta stuff stressful. Games that took too long to set up, or not fully understanding the rules, or getting frustrated if there was a skill gap between him and the adults, and needing to compromise over which game to play. The parents who wrote into the agony aunt column had a similar experience, their kid 'begged' for games but would panic over losing. And I know a lot of my friends have reported disliking games because they were forced to play as children and punished for not having socially accepted emotional responses. Or because they played with horrible gatekeepery peers who didn't have the patience to teach games to relatively inexperienced players and belittled them for mistakes. I think we're doing better with G, nearly 5: she is, on a good day, cognitively able to play games aimed at much older age groups, but there's still the issue that sometimes the game takes too long, losing can be stressful, it's not fair that sometimes it's someone else's turn to choose which game we play, and so on. And I am worried that we're kind of pressuring her into playing because it's a way to get adult attention, but maybe she would enjoy other kinds of attention more. I think one thing we've all got better at, especially me, is just accepting that sometimes you can have fun for 20-30 minutes, but you don't get to finish the game because the kid just doesn't have the attention span, and that's fine.

I think a big part of it is verbal and numerical literacy. My sibs and I were all very precocious readers and had no problem reading the rules for ourselves and playing games where a lot of the information is contained in text on the cards. And we could add up the score and therefore have a clear sense of who was winning or which moves would give lots of points. But for more typical children there's a phase where they understand game tactics but are still at a disadvantage because of simply being less fluent; indeed some games can't really be played at all between people who can read and people who can't, because you need to be able to read and act on secret information, or you have to understand multiplication and probability to come out with a good score.

Some people have suggested starting with co-op games; there are some brilliant ones available nowadays, Pandemic and Flash Point and Library Labyrinth for all ages, Jim Deacove's series which scale in complexity for different ages, from pre-school to teens. I think those help in the sense that they make losing less upsetting, but I also think that the reason children (and many adults!) can find games emotionally taxing isn't only the danger that they might lose. There's still the frustration of waiting for your turn, of not quite having the skill to play the game well, or not being able to read the board position to predict the outcome. And I think adult-child co-op games have the strong risk that the adults will just 'play for you'; if you play against someone with way more experience than you you might lose, but if you play theoretically on the same team as the more experienced player, then at best your contributions are being indulged rather than really valued, and at worst you don't really get to play at all.

Some games lend themselves to offering a handicap to some players, some really don't. It probably depends a lot on the exact personality of the kid; do they feel good about winning more often, or patronized because their opponents deliberately didn't play their best game and gave them a chance, or even bent the rules a bit to give them an advantage? Is it helpful to use house rules to shorten or simplify the game or curb the use of dominating tactics? That can easily have the downside that not everybody is as fully aware of the house rules as you hope, there may be misunderstandings, and also, if the game is well designed to be balanced, changing the rules to please someone finding it stressful might actually make for a worse game.

Please tell me what you think! Did you play with your caregivers as a child, and if applicable do you play with the kids in your life now? What works to have a calm, enjoyable game when there is a big difference in skill levels?

Comments

[maju]

Growing up, my family had what was called a Games Compendium, which my father would bring out occasionally for a family games night. My mother never joined in, but the rest of us did. I have five younger siblings, but most of the games were the classic games: Ludo, Snakes and Ladders (as it was known in Australia) and others. Our father also taught us some card games as we got a bit older. In our teens, my sisters and I played a lot of Scrabble.

I played some games with my own children, and one of my daughters who is now married with two little boys, has a strong family culture of games, including some that involve the children and some that don't.

I play some games with my grandchildren, and it's sometimes difficult to include all three because of their age range. It often turns out to be just the older two playing with me, or just the youngest with me, but the youngest, who is 5, is very competitive with her sisters and shows a lot of skill at strategy. One game that stands out to me as suitable for all ages is one called "Spot It" which involves finding matching pictures (https://www.spotitgame.com/); there are different levels of play. My youngest granddaughter often beats me at that.

[liv]

Oh, that's really interesting. We also call the game 'snakes and ladders' in the UK. Do you have good memories of family games nights with your father and siblings?

I get the impression it's much more common now than in the past for families to be like your daughter's, where adults play games together and with the children. How do you find playing with your grandchildren, do they fight over grandma attention or is it ok to play with some of them and not others?

You're right, there are some games that children are better at than most adults, Spot It (it's called Dobble here but I recognize the branding) is a brilliant example. Also the memory game 'pelmanism' where you have to find matching pairs usually favours little kids. The problem I've sometimes had with Spot It is that for some kids the fast-paced play is fun, no waiting around for your turn and feeling bored or losing focus, but for others needing to be quick can itself be stressful. For me it's a very good feeling when a little kid can beat me fair and square without needing to cheat in their favour.

[maju]

Yes, I remember those family game nights as fun, even though all of us became very competitive with each other. Maybe that was the fun for us.

I agree about young children being better at that memory game than adults too. And yes, I like it when one of my grandchildren is able to beat me fairly.

[liv]

Oh, another issue I forgot to mention is that games are often relatively expensive, and have a lot of small fiddly bits, and sometimes losing even one piece significantly degrades the game. So I think sometimes the issue is asking quite young kids to be more careful of physical stuff than is really developmentally attainable for them. Toys for younger children are designed to be robust, games not so much, even if the game play is targeted at little ones.

[princessofgeeks]

My sister and I played cards with one set of grandparents from a very early age, starting with slapjack and moving on to Go Fish, Crazy 8, etc., and eventually we played pitch and gin rummy with them and finally spades and bridge. They both doted on us and were very happy to bring things to our level and it was all very friendly. I have terrific memories of this.

We played board games with friends and were competitive. I don't remember playing cards much with my parents except for if we were on vacation. They were doing it to indulge us and didn't make a big deal out of who won.

I am not sure if the parents and grandparents let us lose at first or what but somehow they were all able to stress the fun part and not the cutthroat competitive part. It was never a source of stress to play with them. My sister and I learned to love card games and we both do to this day.

I played board games and some cards with my own kids (my husband, their dad, never did -- he had no interest in cards or games at all although I do remember one amazing night when we had a lot of kids in the house and he played Charades with us and was hands-down the very best player of all! Alas, an event never repeated.) The older one had trouble because of his attention span.

Much later when they were older teenagers I taught them some card games but they had moved on to video games and were barely interested. They would play because I liked it and to have a little mom time, I guess.

Amazingly and so wonderfully for me the younger one, who now lives with me, expressed an interest in learning bridge and is now part of our regular group. Which is on hiatus because two of the people who have been the backbone of it for decades can't make time right now. But I think he likes the strategy of it. The older one was interested too but he moved away.

I think, to answer your question, the adults really have to gear down, play games the littler kids can cope with, and as you say, be willing to end the game before it's over. If you have a young player who is obsessed with winning at all costs I think you have to balance letting them win sometimes while having age-appropriate discussions outside the game on how part of the fun is simply playing and maybe use examples from pro sports -- no one wins all the time. Not even Serena Williams. I was super competitive but understood that there would be players better than me. Learning how to lose is so important as a life skill. But always losing to the better or older players when you are a beginner is no fun at all. All games have methods of handicapping for just this reason -- to level the playing field and make it fun for everyone. I think using handicapping is a good thing for family games, but also letting younger kids win can be fine if no one makes a big deal out of it. If a kid ONLY plays if they win, that is a bad track to get on as far as life skills and will make them miserable if they get into sports or games of any kind as teenagers. Good luck!

[raven]

The only game my parents played growing up was carrom - I don't think any other board game would have been available to them, except chess - so my first exposure to board games was as an adult. It makes me wonder if you have to be exposed in childhood to like them, though; board games make my heart sink when card games don't and we did play those when I was small.

[mrissa]

I'm an only child, which changes the shape of the thing somewhat. I was a precocious child, so playing games with agemates often ended in them being pouty and resentful--I have always been skeptical of people who claim that playing sports and games with children helps them to learn how to lose graciously, because the kids around me neither won nor lost graciously. When I (mostly) won, there was frustrated flopping around and "OF COURSE SHE ALWAYS WINS." When I (rarely) lost, there was a great deal of gloating, some of it very personal ("GUESS YOU'RE NOT SO SMART AFTER ALL, HUH? HUH? WHO'S STUPID NOW???" Which would have been mildly defensible if I had called them stupid when I won, but I didn't, so...they were fighting with the me in their heads. This was not, by my reckoning, a good time.)

My grandmother's side of the family was very much into the kind of games I think of as Stupid Card Games. Nothing too complicated in terms of intellectual requirements, things that an average 8yo can play. There was one called 3-to-13 that I particularly hated, because it was a standard set game that took For.Ev.Ar. That was the point, actually: it filled the time without people having to come up with conversation topics in common. But the first round everyone was dealt three cards and play went around in a circle with each player drawing and discarding until they had either a run of three or a set of three. The next round was four cards. Etc. When you got to six, it was two sets or runs of three each. And it was the most boring thing I ever played in my life. My mother used to chide me that I had to work on fixing my face to look pleased and interested, because I would need to play this kind of card game socially as an adult and it would be rude to let people know how stultifying I found it. This, I am glad to say, has been completely untrue.

My godkids are now Big--"all our smalls are big!" I wailed to my bestie at Easter--they are 18 and 23. Which means that at holidays now, games are usually complicated affairs with many different pieces, played by whichever family member is in the mood, with a reasonable number of people of all ages and genders opting at any given time not to play (so that it's always okay not to).

I do remember having a children's game called Uno Moo with my younger godchild. This was a plastic barn with a bunch of plastic animals of different colors that you could take turns putting into the barn--as with Uno itself, your play had to follow the previous play in color or type. A blue sheep to be followed by a blue cow or a red sheep, say. Coincidentally, Younger Godchild's family nickname is Moo, and ONE of their godparents who was NOT ME taught them to say, "Uno Moo uno mas?" in the most adorably hopeful tones. We all hated Uno Moo so much, except for Moo, who had an infinite number of rounds of it in them. God I was so glad when they outgrew that.

[mrissa]

Oh, I should say: my dad's mother's side of the family was not fully adjusted to people playing with "devil cards" (a normal deck of cards) by the time I showed up in the world. All they ever played was Rook, and games were in general suspect, because they might be gambling, which was sinful, and they were certainly playing with chance, which was sinful.

We did not see much of this lot of relatives, but whenever I complained about how boring a game was, I got told it could be worse, I could be with relatives who wouldn't let me play it at all. I had varying opinions on whether this would be worse, depending on the day.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> I generally think having more content here is good. <<

I agree.

>> I'm kind of a hypocrite because I love when people commit to posting more frequently or regularly, but I never really do so myself. <<

It's okay to enjoy without contributing. It's nice when people post more, but it's not required.

Worth mentioning: some folks aim for 3 anchor posts instead of daily posts.

>>I was interested in people's thoughts about playing board games including both adults and children.<<

We played both board games and yard games together, sometimes with other friends, and enjoyed it. I still have a fondness for the rare games that incorporate multiple skill levels in the same game -- Star Trek Fluxx is a good example of that, where the character card you choose can have easier or harder win requirements.

>>it was more that I wanted to play games with interesting tactics rather than games of pure luck<<

I'm not good enough at that kind of thing to be interested in logic/strategy games by themselves. I go for games with an interesting storyline where there are obvious things for me to do, so I don't have to figure out a winning strategy. I also love stacking-block games.

>> sometimes the game takes too long <<

One thing I love about modern games is that most of them have an average playtime written on the outside of the container. I'm a particular fan of small games in the $20 or under -- which one of our local game stores shelves separately -- and those often take half an hour or less to play. It's just a great category because you can easily run several different ones in a game night, as opposed to one long game, plus have filler if a long game ends sooner than usual.

>> I think a big part of it is verbal and numerical literacy. <<

Some is, but that depends tremendously on game selection, and that is a big part of my game collection strategy. I want to have games that anyone could play. So for instance, we've got a set of picture dominos in addition to dot dominos, and we've got a visual-spatial card game where you try to figure out which cards have the most of a target color to put them order, plus the stacking-block games are mostly about intuitive physics and kinesthetic intelligence with a little strategy if you feel like adding that. Then it's just a matter of figuring out what your current players do well and enjoy, so as to select suitable games.

>> Some people have suggested starting with co-op games <<

That can work. There are more of those nowadays, plus games that balance competition and cooperation like Chrononauts.

>>There's still the frustration of waiting for your turn<<

There are turnless games, not a lot, but enough to make that an option; and also some really fast-paced games with minimal downtime. Some turn-based games have things to do while it is not your turn, like interrupting or responding to other players' actions, or setting up things for your own turn. For someone who hates waiting, these are worth exploring.

Basically to have a fun game night with mixed abilities, and this includes adults with challenges as well as children, you need things like:

* People who care enough about each other that if someone gets upset, they can deal with it calmly instead of making it worse.

* Knowledge of people's current and evolving abilities and interests.

* A wide variety of different kinds of games that need different abilities, last for different times, and have other diverse features.

* Enough understanding of game theory so you can spot when tweaking one little thing would make a game much more playable, and then how to do that effectively.

* A game store that has a lot of diversity in products, so you can see what the available options are and compare those to your current players and game closet.

[ewt]

My father taught me checkers and eventually chess but we didn't play often -- I didn't live with him. My grandfather used to play card games with me, starting with "snap" when I was very small, and then eventually cribbage; had he lived long enough I think bridge would have been the next step. My paternal grandparents were into Scrabble and used to let me play sometimes, and I also played Scrabble with my dad and stepmum sometimes, though my stepmum much preferred Rummoli. I encountered Monopoly with some neighbours, and joined in games with children and adults sometimes, though I was a little too young to really enjoy it. And even when I was very small my dad would initiate games like "I spy" with me, usually in the car when we were on our way somewhere. My grandfather would sometimes play hide and seek with me.

I don't recall ever playing games with my mother. My stepdad once got some board game that came with a "scary" video and would make us play it with him, but it was too scary and too long for my younger brother and not really scary at all to me at that stage.

I did have some kind of Nintendo system at some stage and used to play Super Mario, eventually also with my brother. And I inherited a first-gen Gameboy at some stage and enjoyed Tetris. A computer game called "Winnie the Pooh and the Hundred Acre Wood" on the Commodore 64 essentially taught me to read one summer.

There were outdoor impromptu games with local kids in some of the places I lived: tag, hide and seek, snowball fights in winter. The grownups weren't involved in these games unless someone got hurt or stuck in a tree or something.

[karen2205]

We often put the youngest child in a team with someone else and sometimes she starts playing on her own and then joins someone else. Fairly frequently we don't get to the end of a game - the children become bored and want to do something else) or we run out of time and declare a draw. We often modify rules as we play. Sometimes - I think my most recent example is checkers, I have to check the rules online because I don't know / have forgotten them, so our playing isn't fluent. This is board games as 'method of entertaining the children' rather than board games everybody is enjoying playing together.

[melannen]

We played a fair number of board games when I was a small child in the 80s and early 90s! (and contrary to what I hear these days about "adult" board games being new, when my parents occasionally managed to get together with their adult friends they were usually playing board or card games or sometimes Charades - it just wasn't a status/hobby thing like it often seems to be treated now.)

When we were very young we tended to play games like Candyland that were pure chance, or simple games like Memory or Blockhead (a Jenga precursor), or with a few packs of cards that let you play games like Go Fish! by matching pictures, without knowing numbers. Those are games that kids can generally play nearly as well as adults and everyone can enjoy. As we got older we moved to playing games like Clue or Scrabble or cards with standard packs or Trivial Pursuit with different questions for adults and kids.

I think the key really is having adults that are capable of modeling being a good sport, tbh. Enjoying the game and not caring about winning is learned, and so is caring way too much about winning! And, honestly, so is knowing that sometimes it's more fun to throw the game and let other people have fun than to win for the fifth time in a row; the first time a kid realizes they have a chance to let their adult win feels amazing, if they've had that modeled. And so is letting yourself enjoy a game that might not be challenging or the game you really wanted to be playing, because the fun is in the people you're with. I have played with a lot of adults who are worse at those things than your average 5-year-old, to be honest. And that's learned too. I really wanted to ask in that agonyaunt column which adults she had picked up on her winning anxiety from, but it didn't really feel productive...

And also you need a willingness to look for games that adults and kids can play together even if they're not your absolute favorite games - which is also part of being a good sport! Something like Memory isn't necessarily easier for adults than kids, and it's not like it suddenly stopped being an enjoyable pasttime just because I can also play chess and Catan now. And if the kid is never winning without an obvious throw, or the adult is never having fun, or it's taking too long to finish a game, that's a cue to think about what game you could both enjoy playing and do some cooperative problem-solving about it. But I feel like lately there's a lot of marketing board games at very specific ages so you're more likely to end up with a kid who loves a game adults hate and an adult who only plays games kids can't and nobody knowing how to meet in the middle.

Tbh I have some local friends who are really into the adult board games collector hobby and I often feel like it sometimes loses sight of the actual fun of games? People will haul a bunch of really complicated games around - a lot of them limited edition Kickstarter ones or whatever - and then spend all their time trying to figure out how to play new games, many of which they end up not enjoying and never playing again, rather than just leaning back and enjoying a fun game everyone already knows and likes. I mean, that's definitely it's own fun and many of those games are delightful aesthetic objects in their own right, but we had an ongoing weekly game night at my church for quite awhile in the early 2000s which got a good mix of ages; we played exclusively Dominoes, Scrabble, Pinochle, and sometimes go fish or jenga if there were younger kids, and nobody got bored.

Another one of my local friends has honestly gotten really turned off from playing games with board game friends because he's got reading difficulties; he loves playing games he knows that don't require a lot of reading but he can't enjoy the spend thirty minutes squinting at instructions and then have to constantly read things off the millions of little cards part. And, frankly, I also hate the learning to play/setup part: I like a good fancy game, but if I'm here to have fun I would much rather play Go Fish with the littles than squirm for ages wondering when we are going to stop grabbing the rules from each other and arguing about things we aren't going to figure out until we see how it plays anyway.

[superborb]

I really think people who have board games as a hobby belong to two pretty orthogonal sets, the 'playing a fun game / mastering a game' and the 'novel game' camps, and it can be hard to find common playing ground between the two!

[maju]

I forgot to say before that I really like it when more people post/people post more often.

[silveradept]

I certainly had plenty of games with family and siblings as I was growing up - the ones I remember that aren't things like Snakes and Ladders or Candy Land were all games of some amount of strategy and planning, but that were also venues for the children to practice their maths skills, as my parents were generally adamant that the children had to play the bank and do the sums and calculations when such things were needed. So we played games such as Payday and Careers, along with an interesting one called The Inventors as we got older.

We'd mix in trivia games like Trivial Pursuit as we aged, as well, and once the questions for the game started reflecting our lived experiences, rather than the things before our lived experiences, the children got much better at the game.

My family also likes word games. We didn't play much Scrabble, but we would definitely play many a round of Boggle - but the Big Boggle (5x5 grid, minimum four letter words for points) Even now, I play with my older sibling a digital version of it called Lexica over the Internet. Boggle was good for us, and for players of differing skill levels, because the grid allowed us to see all kinds of different words in the board, and even when you're playing against others, sometimes everyone sees a completely different board and comes up with unique words for everyone else to marvel at the finding of. (Big Boggle is definitely a good idea for playing with children, and if you like, you can raise or lower the minimum word length based on lexical skill.)

Playing cards was a staple of family gatherings and extended family gatherings as well. I know that I learned cribbage at a relatively early age, and that it also worked well as a lot of maths practice, since it's counting in odd intervals for the card count, and in odd intervals for the scoring counts as well. The other cards of note were Hearts (colloquially "Nasty Cards") and Pinochle (double deck, no less, so holding all your cards in your hand was an exercise). We'd also occasionally dip into Oh Hell, which has a fun variation on it currently for sale called Wizard that adds four Wizards that take all and four Jesters that lose to all, but otherwise plays the same.

We all agreed that Clue / Cluedo was banned after my father, seeing one pass of evidence from one person to another, declared he knew the case and was correct. That pretty well sapped any interest in continuing to play if we could be out-logiced so easily.

The Eurogames came along after I made it to adulthood, but I have played various of them with children and teens of differing ages, and I much prefer the games that give everyone a useful thing to do on their turn, or to do on someone else's turn to further their ends. I much prefer the role cards-enabled version of Catan that was Star Trek Catan, because it meant that no turn or roll was ever actually wasted and even someone who hadn't received good placement could still do useful things with their roles. Ticket to Ride is one of the favored ones among the siblings, which can be both cooperative or competitive depending on how you're feeling in that game.

For the games program that I run once a month professionally, the most popular games seem to be Blokus (a mino placing game) and Sushi Go! (a hand-passing game that's not as complicated as 7 Wonders), but admittedly, most of the gaming in that program is gaming on the video game consoles.

Skill level differences are often not as pronounced in the games, and mostly since we're trying to be social rather than competitive, occasionally when someone gets stuck, I lean in and make a suggestion about where a piece could go to keep the game going and open other possible avenues.

(A game I'd like to see them play more is Tsuro, but mostly because I think it's fascinating, and the fact that so many of those games end in a draw for everyone is something that I think gets children to want to try again repeatedly.)

[librarygeek]

My parents, siblings, and friends for decades wouldn't play Clue/Cluedo with me if I even got to touch the cards. They were convinced I was using ESP instead of logic and patterning (shrug). Now spouse and I have taught our only child how to play, by starting with us adults handicapped like not being able to write anything down, and R gets the notebooks, until they can give us a good game.

[silveradept]

That seems like an effective way of handicapping the game for the little one to play fairly with.

(Still banned. Even though I have a Simpsons version of Cluedo in my game shelves.)

It also definitely helps that we never had a dearth of games we could play, so getting rid of one didn't hamper our ability to keep playing.

It's also a fine tradition of the family to complain about the poor dealing of cards to everyone, doubly so if you were the dealer.

I'm also reminded we played Euchre a fair amount because it moves quickly and only requires remembering a couple of oddities.

[matsushima]

I generally think having more content here is good. Some people don't agree, they really dislike those times in early January and April-May when everybody makes resolutions to post more and the site gets busy.
I can't imagine why anyone would be mad about Dreamwidth getting a little more lively! It's such a quiet site, even during those "resolution seasons."

[sorcyress]

I really liked reading this post!

My most immediate reaction to anything about games-and-kids is to emphasize what my friend anu3bis called "the metagame" as a an explicit part of gaming. He and his spouse are extremely into games, and so their offspring (the LionCub) began playing board games at an extremely young age. In addition to being taught rules and probabilities, he was explicitly taught that there is a metagame that you can win or lose completely independent of the specific game...and that it's much more important to do so, because winning the metagame means people will want to play more games with you in the future! It included skills like not being a sore winner or loser, being able to wait your turn, how to not be over-helpy, etc.

Another explicit part of the metagame was that his parents told 'Cub that many adults have more experience/ability at games and they are not going to go easy on him or not play their best against him. They told the adults the same thing. Obviously adults also had to win the metagame --no gloating or anything-- but the idea was "if you are going to be treated as an equal player at this game table, then you are going to be treated as an equal player.

I have a very fond specific memory of playing a game of Dominion with LionCub during a week in the summer where I was babysitting him every day. He was probably...8? Maybe as old as 9? We had been playing various things, and he had asked specifically for Dominion, and then our second or third game I absolutely trashed him at it. I don't remember the exact final score, but I had made a card engine that clicked delightfully and had basically my own highest scoring game ever (think, like, 50 points to 7 or something). And LionCub looked at that final score and very politely said "thank you, I think I'd like to play something else now". It was so refreshing to be able to have done something that was fun for me (create a working deck engine) and even though it wasn't necessarily fun for him, he was able to look at the broader space and understand that it wasn't solely about him.

(I think I encouraged him to pick something I hadn't played before and he thrashed me at Carcassone for a few rounds and everyone had a good time that day).

***

I find it interesting that your question was "tell me about your own childhood playing games" and I am instead telling you about my own adulthood playing with a child, so maybe I will come back and add more later, since I had parents who owned a copy of Settlers imported and a set of printed-out translated rules from somewhere (the internet? from 1997 internet???). I was playing Magic: the Gathering with my da when I was like, seven (because he had made a relatively simple red/green deck that both players would draw from to play each other), and I've been playing most of the old Looney Labs card games (original Fluxx, Aquarius, Chrononauts...) since before they were published since Andy is an ollld college friend of my mom's.

...

Okay I have to go ring bells, I really will end this now and come back later. Thanks for asking about it!

~Sor

[shreena]

Interesting post and comments.

My thoughts in no particular order:

I think that more generally there has been a shift in parenting towards playing with your children rather than leaving them to entertain themselves, it is often something that my parents/parents in law and their peers mention.

I am more in the playing with space as a parent because I enjoy play - I think I am just a more playful person than average. I actively loved roleplaying type play with my children - pretend to be a customer at the imaginary shop type games.

We do play games with our children - incidentally I really recommend a Facebook group called Little Board Gamers

It does often end up a little fraught, the little one does find it hard to lose. And it's genuinely quite hard I think to judge what games are the right level for what child/age.

Jovan for a long time would call a game called rat a tat cat "too hard" despite being well into the age range for it but can play and enjoy some adult games (patchwork, Jaipur and even Settlers)

We just own a large range of games and try and take it as it comes.