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

Live action Toy Story!

Toys and Games and Kids

Been a while. Sorry about that. Also sorry that I apologize so often. It'll get better. Maybe? Anyway...

Update on the previous post...

plane: Haven't flown in a bit.

paintball: Timing was wrong on that one; wife went from unable to play due to being pregnant to being unable to play because we're chasing down two kids non-stop. Not sure how I didn't see that one coming. Oh well, the paint will wait.

Bought a motorcycle. Totally counts as a toy since it is of no practical value. I just joy-ride. Also, time permitting, I want to get into the hobby of maintaining it, fixing it, modifying it. We'll see. For now, I gotta bring it to the shop 'cause still chasing two kids.

Went to a fan convention for "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic". That was awesome. (And cool and radical. In joke.) Managed to score a one of a kind, hand made, Pinky Pie plushie. The character of Pinkie Pie means a lot to me; she taught me to just be yourself - even if that self loves toys. I also have a nice collection of little MLP figurines.

On to the actual topic of this post...

I was playing Pocket Planes today (no surprise as I play it most hours of most days) and recalling a review which opined this is barely a game and it occurred to me really it is more of a toy. The difference between the two seems to me this: toy = thing you interact with for fun and game = toy which has a win and/or lose condition. You don't usually find yourself unexpectedly sad or frustrated with building blocks, but you do with a Rubic's cube and yet both involve manipulating geometric shapes. Maybe if you were building a really tall tower and it fell over, but then you've set yourself a challenge, entering game territory.

So Pocket Planes: no win or lose condition, just a steadily expanding empire. If you are doing well then it expands rapidly, but even the poorest play will still result in expansion. Really, this is a toy. You poke at it and it makes beeps and boops and it's entertaining.

This got me thinking about the time I've been spending introducing my oldest kid to the world of gaming. The wife and I are big board-gamers and we're happily looking forward to the day our kid can sit down with us to a game of Agricola or Blue Moon City. To that end, I've been slowly introducing her to various game concepts. I either take a game we own and dumb it down or we find age appropriate games and play those. She's currently 5 yrs old and having difficulty with the whole win/lose thing. She starts crying if she loses. This thing is, I'm not interested in trying to teach her strategy or tactics. I just want her to learn to hold a hand of cards, rol dice and move game pieces, things like that. I realized with my distinction of toy vs game that what I need is to take the game mechanics I'm trying to teach her OUT of the game and stick them into a toy. I want her to PLAY with game mechanics in a safe, non-competitive environment.

I mentioned this to the wife and the first example that came to her mind was auctioning. OK. So I took some cards from Mamma Mia, a pizza building game, and a pile of pennies and said "What we are going to do is bid on these pizza ingredients. The goal is to accumulate one of each ingredient before you run out of money." I had a deck of 15 cards, 3 of each of the 5 ingredients. So there was totally enough cards for each of us. All she needed to do was learn to not over bid. She's too young for multiplication but I knew that as long as she didn't bid more than 3 coins for a card too many times that she'd be fine. The first game we both won but she got upset because I got to 5 cards first. I assured her that it was not a race. The only goal was to get 5 cards and that was something we could both do. The next game we both won. The game after that she over bid and lost. Minor bit of upset but she understood where she went wrong. She got over excited and forgot that she could let a card pass if the bidding got too high and then wait for the next one. The last game she was very careful to not bid more than 3 per card and she won.

I think it was a total success. I think I could make it even more toy and less game by running a pretend auction house where we bid on her stuffies and I'm calling out bids in that fast auctioneer voice. Then it's simply pretend play but with real auction mechanics.

Anyway, this idea of "introducing kids to gaming by taking the game mechanics out of the game and make a toy out of them" is a theme I'll be exploring a bit around here. I will tag those posts with "kids" in case you want to follow just those.

As always, keep playing with toys!

Planes and Guns

Ok, before we get to planes and guns, I re-read my last post because it was so gosh darn long ago I didn't remember what I had talked about and I was curious. So Crazy Bones. I'm still collecting them. Collecting? I don't know if that's accurate. I'm still buying them. Sometimes I pick one and carry it in my pocket for the day. ALSO you know how in any collection there are good ones and uninteresting ones, right? So I've got a 4 year old who always wants to play (or take) daddy's toys so what I did was cull my collection and give the bones I didn't like to my kid. She's got some decent ones too because really I felt I needed to keep my collection to a reasonable size. ALSO, and here's the shameful part, if we're in the store and she says "Can we buy?" and it's something I want too then I feel less guilty buying it. Cause it's making me happy AND her happy too. :D

Planes and Guns

I recently sold my entire MtG collection and so found myself with some money. I was at my local toy store and they've got R/C planes and... have I talked about my past experience with R/C planes? In short it involved me and my dad and lots of trees and rebuying the same plane, like, four times. I had finally had one (ONE!!!) good flight and then my dad put it in a death spiral and it hit the ground so hard the engine came out the back and at that point we gave up. That was years ago (maybe more than 10 years?) and here I was thinking maybe I'd give it another go. The nice lady at the store directed me away from the plane that needed additional parts to the one that was ready to fly right out of the box (look for the acronym RTF). The store lady said this was the best beginner's plane.

Well let me tell you she was right. I've had this thing up dozens of times, had some real rough landings (got stuck in a tree but got it down) and basically had tons of fun whereas that time 10 years ago was nothing but frustration. Oh! Should mention the actual item: Super Cub LP RTF by Horizon Hobby. This thing just works. It is forgiving enough that you can get some skills without destroying the plane each time. I'm at the point where I'm taking off and landing using my driveway for taxiing! I'm also trying to scope out a bigger field cause really my yard is just a tad small for this.

ALSO

After wanting this for maybe 2 years I've finally got paintball equipment. But I'm sleepy now so I'll talk all about it next post. :)

Bottom line I'm still playing with toys, finding ways to squeeze in hobby time in between parenting and housekeeping time. Keep playing!

collectables - the drug of toyland

The problem with collecting is, I think, the value is in the chase not the actual object and then once you're done you've spent lots of time and money and now have a pile of something that doesn't bring a lot of meaning or value to your life. I've done pretty well resisting for a while, but I got the bug again. I was in Target looking at what was new in collectable toys. "Why Target?" you ask? I was following the art toy scene for a while, but it's a pricey scene. I spent months considering spending hundreds of dollars on Gorillaz figurines, but held out. Bit by bit tho I acquired a few pieces at reasonable prices, culminating in my awesome wife getting me for my birthday a very limited piece I had my eye on. Isn't that a sweet piece? I love it. I should actually post my whole meager collection up here.

Anyway, with a respectable art toy collection on my shelf I considered that itch sufficiently scratched. That was a few months ago tho and I recently found myself at Target looking at Crazy Bones. Look at 'em. They're like little art toys but much cheaper. So I got a few and now I find myself doing that stalking thing where I'm checking the toy section of whatever store I'm in. This is the pull of desire. According to the Buddha it is the root of all suffering, but damn if I don't feel more alive when in it's grasp.

Maybe you can detect the feelings of guilt in this post. Probably due to all that Buddhism. I feel like I've taken up smoking. On the plus side I don't feel an urge to "collect 'em all" which is good because that is a quick route to spending lots of cash. I need to find a place to display what I've got so far and then we'll see where this newest hobby goes from there.