Raising a gamer

Being an avid boardgamer, I have always been very keen on getting my kid able to play boardgames as soon as possible. Obviously there are developmental milestones a kid has to reach before it can even be possible to teach them certain gaming concepts, but I'm convinced there's always something I can do to bring her a little closer to ready. Games like Candyland teach basic skills like flipping cards from face-down to face-up, matching colors, and moving forward along a track. It also teaches how to wait for your turn, how to deal with the emotional highs and lows of being ahead vs being behind, and of course someone winning and everyone else losing. These are necessary skills and experiences for any young gamer to learn, but unfortunately it seems most kids games stop here. There doesn't seem to be anything bridging the gap between these most basic game-playing skills and real, strategic game playing.

(This might be due to the fact that here in the US there isn't much in the way of real board gaming. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you'll have to take my word that there are hundreds of really good and varied and interesting boardgames in this world.)

So what I've been doing is looking at the games I like to play and teasing out the gaming concepts from the rest of the game. My little 5 year old may not be ready for a pile of complex rules and strategizing, but she sure is ready to move on from "wait your turn and move down the track". For example, I play a number of games that involve bidding. Some thing will be randomly revealed and the players bid coins to see who gets it. The things they acquire through bidding, plus how well they manage their money, go together with other rules to make some very interesting games. But what I did was devise a very simple bidding "game". I'll take card with pictures on them and give us each a pile of pennies and we'll bid on the pictures. Over the course of a few "games" she complained that I had more pictures than her. I pointed out how she was bidding very high on some pictures and so she was running out of money much faster than me. After a few more tries she learned that she might have to pass up on a picture she wants if the bidding is going too high, or she'll run out of money.

Another example: trading. I created a very simple game where we pretended we were waiters in a restaurant. We had a few orders from customers for various combinations of food. The kitchen was giving us food randomly (we drew colored blocks out of a bag). So the challenge was to learn how to trade away food you didn't need for food you did need in order to complete your orders. My daughter, the angel she is, would look over at my orders and say "Daddy, you need some french fries so here you can have mine. I don't need them." I thanked her. I also explained that she could hold on to the fries until she saw I had something she needed; then we could trade.

I just discovered Catan Junior and because we've been practicing trading my daughter got this game right away. She beats me regularly. Mission accomplished :D