Early Board Games
I love boardgames, and when the boys were young, I knew I wanted to introduce them to boardgames. I was lucky that my best friend is not only a more avid boardgamer (and pretty much any other hobby I have, but that's a different story) but also very aware of the board game ecosystem, and introduced me to HABA, which makes a line of games for young children. The game he introduced me to was My First Orchard, and it was also the first game the boys played. What follows is the boardgames they play now, and how I modify those games to make the strategy more clear, the game more fun, or anything else.
My First Orchard #
My first orchard is a very basic boardgame where there are four trees, each with a different colored fruit, and the players have to get all the fruit in the basket before the bird gets to the orchard. It introduces a few concepts to young players:
- cooperative gaming
- turn taking
- lose conditions
Strategy #
There is one minor strategy element to the game: one of the six faces of the die is a basket, which allows a player to pick whatever fruit they want. The preferred choice is always the fruit with the most remaining, but we've never really spelled this out to the boys.
Early Playthroughs #
When I started playing this game with our youngest, I started with just one tree, with one of each fruit on it. This made the game much shorter, and harder to lose. The length of the game was the primary concern. As he seemed more able to tune in for the full duration, I added trees until we were playing with the full game. He's just turned 3, and we've probably been playing the game for at least a year, probably more.
Monza #
In the last year or so, we got Monza. I don't remember if it was for my oldest son's birthday or Christmas. In Monza, you roll a pool of six dice, each die having a group of colors on it. You race around a similarly color-coded track by plotting the best course using the colors you rolled against the colors on the track. In addition to all the things introduced by First Orchard, it has a very heavy strategy aspect and the idea of competition.
Learning the Strategy #
When I play with the boys, we physically place the colored dice on the board to plot out our path. I wasn't doing it this way at first, and I recently came to the conclusion that they weren't really understanding how the game actually worked because I was doing the majority of the work for them of figuring out where they could go--looking at the dice in the dice tray (the empty box) and comparing it to the track was a step too far. Now that they are adding the dice to the board to plot their path, they are much more involved, and are starting to understand the strategy.
Red Light Green Light #
Red Light Green Light is a Chuckle and Roar game from Target, rather than a HABA game. We picked this up kind of on a whim, which is how I get most of my board games. We've been playing it most of this year. It is a 'push your luck' game. Players take turns drawing cards, choosing to get another one, hoping for as many green light cards as they can, which determines how far they can move. If they get a red light, though, they get 0 moves. In addition to this push your luck mechanic, it also introduces hazards, as you can get a cone card and place it in front of a player to make them have to move left or right before moving forward.
Luck and Doubt #
My oldest son really struggled with this game at first, and would always move on his first green card. I probably gave the most explicit strategy coaching on this game by telling him that he should always try for at least three lights or three cards before going. He also was more sensitive to losing this game, and often lost because he wouldn't push his luck, and this is when we were getting a better picture of his other compounding factors, which is probably what led to explicit coaching.
Adventure Tactics #
Very recently, I picked up Adventure Tactics on a whim. I'd been primed by Tom Vasel saying this game was the best family play experience he had ever had. This has square based movement and combat, a deck builder mechanic, levels of success, and lots of player choice. It's a complex game that I can't fully describe here and that is difficult enough that my wife and I enjoy it, and balanced enough that we've only ever failed one scenario, but we've also never gotten a success+.
Engagement #
Our oldest loves this game. It's his favorite game, and he has become attached to the archer, making a lego minifig of her. He is able to reason about and make decisions about who to target, which cards to play, whether he wants to be further up or further down or in the same place in the turn order, and has been able to select the cards he wants to add to his deck.
Our youngest does okay with it--he can't read so we have to read him the cards, but after having played a few times, he recognizes the ones that allow him to move and hit. He plays the knight, which simplifies his math to 'can I move to them'. The biggest downside for him is that the playthrough takes longer than he wants to sit still, so we find ourselves setting up alternate scenarios that can be finished one way or another in less time. He did much better on our most recent playthrough.