DW-versary and board games
May. 9th, 2025 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI missed my anniversary of moving to DW – this has been my online home since 3 May 2009, a slightly astonishing 16 years. Anyway, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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 inagonyaunt 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?
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?
