Playing More Advanced Games with Younger Children

by Gino

If you play games, and you’ve got kids, you’ve probably played games with your kids. We all know Candyland, and if you’re a gamer, you dread playing this game with your kids, but you play it anyway. That’s good. Your kids deserve your time. But, if you want to get out of the traditional, mundane kids games, there are a host of options out there. Visit your friendly local game store, and you’ll find some good options. HABA and Blue Orange Games are two great publishers of kid’s games. But, what I’m going to talk about today are more advanced games that kids can play. Playing before their time, as it were. I’m only going to talk about four games, but the strategies can be applied to many other games. 

Dungeon from Wizards of the Coast is the first game I want to tell you about. It’s recommended for ages 8 and up. In Dungeon, you’re a hero; a rogue, fighter, cleric, or wizard, and you enter the dungeon, moving from room to room slaying monsters and collecting treasure. Different heroes have different strengths and weaknesses, and different win amounts. The primary game mechanic is rolling dice to see if you defeat the monster. So, as soon as kids are learning adding and comparing numbers, they can play. The younger kids will need some help with the strategy of not going too deep in the dungeon with a character designed for the upper levels, and they probably don’t want to play a wizard. A few of the magic items will need to be explained and they’ll need help with, but the basic mechanic is adding a pair of dice and comparing to a target number. 

Also recommended for ages 8 and up is Iello’s King of Tokyo. In this game, you take on the role of a monster smashing Tokyo! What fun! As with Dungeon, the primary mechanic is rolling dice. Unlike Dungeon, the dice sides will represent different things, rather than adding numbers. You collect glory, attack your opponents, or gather energy to buy cards. The hard part of this game is reading and understanding the cards. So, this part of the game requires a certain level of reading ability, or patient adults willing to read and explain the cards to the younger than recommended player. One thing that you can do to make this a little easier, is to go through ahead of time and remove the most complex cards. This won’t have too profound of an effect on the game. Adding these cards back in later makes it seem like an expansion to the game.

Cooperative games are a really good to play with kids. Since you’re working together, you can give them as much help as needed.  Star Trek: 5 Year Mission by Mayfair Games is one of these. It’s recommended 10 and up. As an officer of the Starship: Enterprise, you’re trying to resolve missions.  The primary game mechanic is matching dice to missions. Color and number matter. Some of the strategy is hard for the younger ones, and special abilities get forgotten. In this game, different conditions come up that make it harder. Timed missions where you only have 2 minutes to resolve a mission is one. Kids tend to play slower, so this becomes more of a challenge. Communication failures can be really difficult. When this condition comes up, nobody can talk to anybody else until the mission is resolved or failed. Again, this just makes the game that much more challenging when playing with younger, inexperienced players. 

One of the most scalable games is Carcassonne by Z-Man Games, previously from Rio Grande Games. Rio Grande recommended it for 13 and up, but my son started playing at the age of 6, minus a few rules. Carcassonne is a tile laying game. You draw a tile and lay it on the field, matching it’s sides to those that it’s adjacent to. So walls, roads, fields, etc. all have to match up to those next to it. Sounds simple, right? The strategy comes in placing your followers out on the map. You put thieves on the road, knights in the castle, monks in the abbey, or farmers in the field. This isn’t too bad, except for the farmers. We don’t use the farmers with our son because they are really tough to strategize, figure out how best to play them and how to finally score them. Farmers are the most complex part of the game. We also don’t use the doubling rules. Certain tiles and/or conditions count as 2 instead of 1. It’s much easier to calculate and see what’s happening without these rules. So, even though it was suggested for 13 and up, it’s very scalable down to a much younger age. Now that Z-Man Games has it, they've changed the recommended age to 7+. Looking at the rules, the farmers are now a "supplemental" rule, and not part of the regular play rules. So, apparently they've seen this as a way to make the game more playable for a younger player.

So, if you’re tired of Candyland, and those other games with kid themes, think about introducing your kids to a more advanced game. There are certain things you need to keep in mind as you pick a game to try. The game needs to be scalable; you have to be able to play someone younger. The primary mechanic can’t be too complex. The strategy can’t be too complex or require too much planning that a younger person isn’t ready for. Cooperative games can alleviate some of this, but not all. If the strategy can’t be understood by the child, they won’t really enjoy the game all that much. Choose a game that doesn't take too long to play. Most kids won't be ready for a 4-hour game. Try to keep it under 45 minutes.  This is worth trying, because if you are more interested, you’ll more willing to play with your kids longer. Your kids want to play games with you, so everybody wins! 

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The Social Acceptance of Gaming

by Gino

If you’ve been reading our blog, you know that we recently blogged about the passing of Jack Chick. A notorious anti-gamer, anti-a-whole-bunch-of-other-things, and creator of “Chick Tracts.” His outspokenness on gaming, and especially Dungeons & Dragons, was one of the reasons that gaming and D&D have been seen is such a bad light. His publication of the tract Dark Dungeons made D&D out to look like a gateway into actual spell-casting and devil worship. Complete fiction, of course. His influence, along with some others, made quite a few people afraid of D&D. A game. People who played D&D, and just about any other board game, were ostracized. As a gamer in college, I learned to not admit to playing D&D and other games to people. Even some people that I knew fairly well, didn’t know I was a gamer. It makes it a bit difficult to find other gamers when they’re afraid to admit it.

As the years have passed, the general societal attitude toward gamers has changed. Gaming is much more accepted that it was, even just a few years ago, let alone a few decades ago. Yea, you still get ignorant people who think that all gamers fall into that silly stereotype of some 20 or 30 year old guy living in their parents’ basement, no job, bathing every month whether they need it or not, never kissed a girl, etc.  But, the fact is, most have jobs, many have families. There are a healthy number of women who game, too. So, the passing of Jack Chick, makes me think about the change in the social acceptance of gaming. What’s changed in that I once wouldn’t readily admit to being a gamer to having no less than a half dozen gaming stores in the St. Cloud area, alone? I think there are a few reasons. Here’s a completely unscientific, totally speculative look at what I think.

I think one of the main reasons for the softening of people’s opinions on gaming and gamers is that most of the people and organizations that have attacked the hobby have been exposed as fanatical, or having an ulterior motive. Taking Chick Publications as an example, they have publications that attack a large number of topics. Some you would expect, non-Christian religions, the occult, Halloween, etc. But they also attack all the other Christian religions that aren’t their narrow, King James, version of Christianity. Funny side note, I remember one of my Catechism teachers using one of the Chick Tracts, while they have some tracts that attack Catholics specifically. I think this helped make them look like religious fanatics, and people didn’t take them as seriously as they might have otherwise. 

Another factor in the growing acceptance if gaming is the early gamers have grown up, had kids of their own, and have introduced them to gaming. So, not only do you have the gamers that come by it on their own, you’ve got families playing together. Gaming is great family time. You can bond with your family, enjoying some really great games, communicating, and not having an electronic device to mediate your game, or just watching a show or movie. Board games get you used to talking with your kids, and your kids used to talking with you. This can only help to facilitate other conversations. You can play competitive games, or cooperative games. Coop games are a really fun time with the younger kids. 

The media has changed their coverage of games over the years. It’ gone from a critical 60 Minutes story in 1985, to ESPN covering a Magic: The Gathering  World Championships in 1997. That tournament wasn’t a magical end to the stigma of gaming, but it went a long way to legitimizing a rather geeky card game. The Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour, yes, there really is a pro tour for a card game, is played all over the world, with real cash prizes. Now today, if you watch Big Bang Theory, one of the most popular sitcoms on TV, they are playing games quite often. Yes, they make fun out them playing games, but games are supposed to be fun!

If you were to ask me what the biggest impact on the growing popularity and acceptance of gaming is, I’d say it’s the number of highly successful celebrities that have admitted to playing Dungeons & Dragons, and/or a number of other board games. If you were to google “celebrity D&D players,” or “celebrity board gamers,” you’ll find countless famous people who admit to playing games. Some of which will really surprise you. Vin Diesel might be the best well known D&D player. He even wrote a forward to one of the D&D books. Wil Wheaton hosts his own web series, TableTop, where he plays a variety of games with other famous people in his circle. The late Robin Williams reportedly played miniature wargames with Billy Crystal, and others. CNN’s Anderson Cooper talked about his obsession with D&D on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, who also played. “I Hit It With My Axe” is a web series of a group of mostly strippers, porn performers, and pin-up models, who have playing Dungeons & Dragons every week for 8 years. The list goes on.

So, things have changed in the hobby of board games. More and more people play every year, and those changes have happened for good reasons. If you don't play now, you might want to consider trying a game or two. They really are fun and challenging. 

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