And I can deal with some tedium if it makes him happy.īut we changed the game a little bit. Because he wanted to, and he asked nicely.
Yesterday, after months of not playing, we brought out the game again and took another crack at it. Games that involve no skill are not good games. You draw a card, you look at a card, you match a color, you move your piece.
And it’s tedious because there is no skill involved. Not because he has a poor attention span, Oot will sit and read books for hours. Oot himself would start to zone out partway through the game. Because it *is* a tedious game, and not just for adults. I felt a connection with my mom when, after playing Candy Land a couple times with Oot, I began to do the same thing. She used to hide the low-level candy cards because they made the game last forever. When I was older, my mom confessed that she’d gotten really tired of Candy Land. Pretty much anything a kid does with their loving parent is going to be fun. But I was a kid back then, so the bar for fun was fairly low. I remember playing Candy Land with my mom. The main purpose of food is to get calories and nutrients, right? But we don’t just sit down and eat two cups of lard and a multivitamin, do we? But you can still have some *game* in there. I know those are the two biggies that you’re getting when you play a kid’s game. The concept of taking turns, following rules. When I started playing with Oot a year or so ago, I was amazed at how much of it wasn’t natural. This second one is not to be underestimated.
It gives your kids the basics of how to play a game. It gives you an excuse to hang out with your kids.Ģ. There are two primary things a kid’s game provides:ġ. We’re not looking for the subtle intricacies of Go. The main things we get from kid’s games isn’t competition. Okay?ĭear everyone: Kids games should be games. I promise it will be a smallish, well-reasoned screed. I really shouldn’t keep this shit bottled up. But I’ve kinda have to get this out or I’ll probably burst a vessel or something. I was just going to come in here and tell a cute story about my kid and then get out under 600 words. I’m not going to go off on some screed about game design here….Īh hell. (This is what my version looked like when I was a kid.) Which means I find a lot of things irritating. You probably also realize that I’m something of a hyper-critical curmudgeonly fuck. So it’s probably not a surprise that I like playing games with my little boy. If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time, or following me on any type of social media you realize that I’m a game player.