Saturday!
The point of Candyland is to provide something that mimics a game in order to teach some very important concepts:
When it is your turn, there are a handful of things you have to do.
When it is not your turn, wait patiently.
Don’t be a poor loser.
Don’t be a rich winner.
Predestination.
If the kid is a little older, they can learn banter between moves.
As such, Candyland is probably one of the most important games for any/all of us, even if, as adults, we see the fun not in playing it, but in watching the small ones figure out how to go through the motions of playing a game.
So let’s say the kiddos have that down. Now it’s time to play something else.
What do you play?
NO NOT MONOPOLY. Jeez. What a great way to turn anybody/everybody off of board games for the rest of their lives. Checkers? Chinese Checkers? Chess? Nine-men’s Morris?
Those might good for the 6 year old who has games down, it seems to me. Not good for the 4 year old who has Candyland down pat. Not yet.
So I stumbled across a dice game that requires no reading (assuming a grownup reads the instructions the first time and teaches the simple game to the child), teaches simple tactical play, and allows for noises to be made:
The conceit is pretty simple: it’s a car race. You are a car on a track and you want to get from the start line to the finish line by rolling five dice. These are dice with six colors (a different color on each side) and you can only move to an adjacent color next to yours on the track. Sometimes, that means that you have three colors to choose from (and the failure state is that you roll nothing but the other three colors… practice saying “you stalled!”). Sometimes that means that you have to roll one specific color (“Come on, BLUE!” “Aw… you’ll get it next time, buddy!”).
Now, here’s where the game has potential to be really exciting: you remove one of the die when you move to the adjacent color with that die, but if you then have new adjacent colors that are still in your remaining dice pool, you can move to that one. Jump to blue, then jump to green, then jump to purple? “Vroom! Vrooooom! VRRRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! SCREEEEEEEECH!”
100% chance, just like Candyland. Running around a track based on the color of the track, just like Candyland. But, sometimes, you can make choices (“do I go to the adjacent red square or the adjacent green square? Well, if I go to the adjacent red square, I can go to the purple square. But if I go to the green square, I can only go to the next adjacent yellow square and I didn’t roll any yellows… okay, we’re going red!”) and it’s the choices that make the game fun and allow you to point out that some game choices are better than others.
Or, I suppose, there’s Chutes and Ladders. That one is a good one too. You can work some moral messages in to that. “Don’t goof off on your bike or you’ll end up in a sling!”
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]
Today I shall be playing HUMAN FOOSBALL.
At a craft beer festival.
In a minor league baseball stadium.Report
I can see how beer would be necessary.Report
Is this anything like sloshball? (Softball with a keg at second.)Report
I had an idea a while back to play a “skins game” (golf, for the links-challenged) for 18 beers (the number/ABV could be adjusted depending upon how veteran the foursome is as drinkers). Scoring rules are normal for skins, only you have to drink the skins you win before the next tee-off. The plan is that winning is self-corrective, and the back nine will be unusually competitive regardless of everyone’s relative skill going in.
I’m too chicken to actually do it.Report
In college, we used to play a self-correcting game called Bong Cribbage.Report
Why can’t those poles move?
I think people should be affixed to specific spots on the pole, and if the pole has multiple people it, they have to run the same direction to move the pole back and forth to reach the ball. Or, more likely, fail to move in the same direction, and hilarity ensues.
That would make it more foosbally. Both having to move together…and completely missing the ball a large percentage of the time. (Maybe I’ve only played with people who are not actually good at the game.)
I would draw the line at requiring people to flip themselves over or under the pole to kick the ball. Even a trained gymnast would have trouble holding a waist high pole and flipping themselves backwards under it.Report
For simple dice games that are kid friendly, we’re fans of Toss Up. It’s about the size of two Altoid tins stacked on one another, so very portable. Grab some scrap paper, a pen and a little bit of flat space and you have a game. It’s helped us survived long layovers in airports, rained out camping trips, etc. And it teaches many of the skills you discuss above.Report
Never played that. I’ll sneak one to the nephews this coming holiday season.Report
Our 3 year old loves Monza, but generally prefers Hoot Owl Hoot.
Also colors, but with three card hands making every turn a choice. Having multiple owls to consider moving further emphasizes strategy. More importantly, though, its cooperative so everyone wins or loses together. And she loves imagining the owls flying home at the end of a night.Report
This hammers home for me that I’m looking at these games with a set of blinders on. “Oh yeah! There are cooperative games too!”
I should probably devote a post or seven to the best ones of those, given that it rarely occurs to me to take them into account.Report
We are big fans of Busy Town. It is Richard Scary’s illustrations and focuses on finding small details in big pictures. Plus it is a team game. All players work to get to the picnic before the pigs eat all the food!
There is a spinner with numbers, “pigs eat” spaces, and “search” spaces. Each player moves their piece based on the number they spin. If you hit “pigs eat” you take away one piece of food from the picnic. The best one, though, is when you hit a search space. You pick a card with a picture of something to search for, like a potted flower or a kite, then everyone looks for that item over the whole board (which is about 5′ long). You place a mini-magnifying glass over each example you find until the timer runs out. Then you count up the examples and everyone moves forward that number.
It is engaging for my 5 year old, my husband and I don’t mind playing, and my 2.5 year old has fun even if she hasn’t grasped the search part of it yet. It is kinesthetic, involves math, teamwork, and observational skills. I highly recommend for kids over 4.Report
Cool!
I’ve never played that one. The closest to that that I have played is Pictureka. It has 9 largish squares all with various different wacky jumbles of sketches on them (on both sides, so they can be better randomized) and the egg timer is set and you have to find 8 fire hydrants or 9 penguins or 7 mail boxes or whatever before the egg timer runs out.
There isn’t a fun narrative that can be ascertained, it’s just a mad jumble of penguins, fire hydrants, mail boxes, traffic cones, magnifying glasses, disembodied mouths, so on and so forth.
Now it is competitive, rather than cooperative, so it’s probably for older kids at that point.Report
Nothing beats Richard Scary illustrations!Report
I’ve never seen the game but I loved his books as a kid.Report
They became popular a bit too late for me, but my kids loved them.Report
We never had candyland – our first board game, I think, was chutes and ladders. It’s kind of an odd board that we have; one of the ladders is based in square 1 so you can never get to it.
Another good one that’s a little more advanced but still well in kid reach is Labyrinth der Meister – the board is a bed for tiles with sections of maze on them – straight paths, right angles, and T junctions – laid out at random at the beginning, and you start each turn by pushing a tile in at one end, shifting a row or column to rearrange the maze, before moving.Report
My kids are 7, 6, 4, 2, and 3 months. We’re pretty big on games before bedtime. At my house we’ve progressed over the last few years through Candyland, War, Uno, Jenga, Chess, Blackjack, Set, and Mastermind.
My two oldest participate fully, and the 4-year old keeps up as best she can. Uno is probably our favorite game: it’s fast, fun, and the little ones can understand it pretty easily. Jenga often results in tears, some shouting and finger-pointing, and hurt feelings. Checkers never really caught on, oddly, even though Chess has been popular. I tried to teach them poker, but that never really took hold either. We’ve tried jigsaw puzzles before, but they don’t seem too fired up over those. I think we may try something like Risk or Go next, or even make the jump to video games.
I agree with you about Monopoly. A proper game of Monopoly seriously takes like 5 hours and requires a certain disposition. I also remember being the only one who liked Monopoly when I was a kid, so I could never ever find anyone to play with. Sigh.Report
Well, no one actually plays Monopoly, they play the game they learned as a kid that involves a Monopoly set. A lot of this involves house rules trying to extend the game to involve young children, for whom it’s totally inappropriate, thus ruining both the game and the experience. Mostly through trying to let people down easy, but instead keeping them hanging around long after they have no chance of winning but with no way to escape.
The real game should be short, vicious, and interpersonal. Hell, it’s about how dysfunctional that type of High Finance is. Not for children, until they’re ready for it later – but when they are, I suspect the real game would be perfect.Report
I think I actually played monopoly straight once or twice.
It’s hideously boring, and designed to take up days.Report
Exactly. We had House Rules Monopoly – no auctioning of “unwanted” properties, no loans, sometimes set a time limit and whoever had the most properties at the end of the time won.
Though to be honest, most of the time the game ended because someone got ticked off over something and flipped the board. Which maybe isn’t too unlike real High Finance, now I think of it…Report
The actual problem with Monopoly is that every single house modification of the rules, or just *ignorance* of the rules, makes the game longer.
Just actually doing bidding on non-purchased properties can cut the game by 90%. Seriously. Hold the damn auctions, people.
The weird thing is, I’ve seen *strategies* listed about how to win at Monopoly. Guys, the winning strategy is: Buy as many properties as possible. At some point, if you have excess money, or after almost the properties have been bought, put as many houses on them as possible, again as fast as possible.
That…is it. That is the entire thing. Don’t try to figure what you should buy. Buy *everything*. Put houses on *everything*…at worse, you just denied a house to someone else. (Note the number of houses in the game is *limited* by the number of houses in the box, no, you cannot start using pennies as houses or whatever.)
The person who gets the most properties, fastest, wins. Period. It is a trivially simple game, and most people understand it so badly that if I play it, and I insist on the actual standard rules, I almost always win. Not because I’m particularly good at it (The game between knowledgeable opponents is completely random.), but as no one else seems to understand it.
It’s weird, because the entire point is *literally in the name of the game*.Report
Sorry! was always a favorite as a kid. And when the boy got older, it was great fun to play with himReport
Hmm, I never played any of the games 538 lists as the best for families. My biggest memory is “The Game of Life”, which I expect aged as well as disco.
Either that or it would plant the seed for kids to become socialists or populists – which might not be bad in the grand scheme of things, but probably not what their parents had intended.Report
I remember playing Wahoo as an early board game.
My grandmother had a big, elaborately painted wooden board she kept tucked away in a corner for that.Report
Not a board game per se, but I have happy memories of playing “Mille Bornes” (“Thousand Milestones”) at my grandma’s with my brother and assorted cousins. It was a card game that tried to mimic a rally-type road race – there were mileposts you could play, and hazards you could throw at your opponent (“Panne d’essence!” – the cards were in French and English). And there were “safety” cards, like having puncture-proof tires.
We were older than five, though.
We also played a lot of Sorry! and one of those games that had the Pop-o-Matic dice (Trouble, maybe?)
When we got older we played Clue, also, but that might be a bit morbid for real littles.Report
Mille bornes was super cool, and I totally forgot the name of the game (played it in french class first grade or so).Report
Hah…I remember that too! Played it a lot as a kid. I still have it in some box somewhere.Report
@fillyjonk
When we got older we played Clue, also, but that might be a bit morbid for real littles.
The actual plot of Clue can be completely glossed over while playing the game. I know some of the cards say some morbid stuff on them, but you don’t even really have to make it a murder…maybe people just ‘hurt’ Mr. Boddy.
OTOH, Clue is probably too *complicated* for children. It’s all about keeping track of both facts (What cards you have seen) and guesses (What other people have presented, assuming they were not lying to confuse people.)
And if you screw it up…you lose. You just lose.
I think the actual minimum *competency* requirement for Clue is probably teenager.Report