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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