I’ve spent the last five years raising a game geek, I mean child, and I’m here to share what’s worked and what hasn’t worked for me. Obviously every child is completely different, so your mileage may (and almost certainly will) vary, but I have a few thoughts that I think may be reasonably universal. I’m going to organize this chronologically because I think that each phase of gaming development builds on the previous phase. You have to learn to walk (i.e., take turns, lose graciously, roll a die, recognize colors / shapes, and count) before you can run!
18 Months: First Steps
- First Orchard
I would definitely recommend starting as young as possible with a game like First Orchard by Haba. While this game has almost no decisions, it is a critical starting point for getting your child comfortable with taking turns, rolling a die, identifying colors, manipulating game pieces, and potentially losing. I’d suggest setting out the game and just playing with the pieces without any rules at first to familiarize your child with the components before eventually adding in the rules when they seem ready. The key skill, as far as I can tell, based on my sample size of one, is patience. For a child to play First Orchard (or any board game), they need to develop a level of patience that enables them to sit still while someone else acts. This is not easy with squirmy little ones, and it requires a lot of patience on the part of the adult too. I think the other key is not to force it. Let the child come to the game, rather than pushing the game on a child that would rather be running around or playing free-form with the pieces.
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Brandon Kempf – Three Games of September
I have a lot of games. A lot of games that are on my shelves, or on my table being played, that I have told myself that I want to review at some point. For one reason or another, this doesn’t always happen. My goal here on The Opinionated Gamers is that I want to get about one review out per week, but I’d like to write about more games. So I’m taking a page out of Patrick Brennan’s playbook, and we’re going to start writing about games in threes, in snapshot form. This should be a good way for readers to get to know me and my gaming tastes a bit better, and also another way for me to talk about games that I maybe don’t really want to dedicate two thousand words to. Welcome to Three Games.
Let’s kick off the Three Games of September by mentioning a couple games that we played in September that will have reviews coming in October, fingers crossed. Aqualin, Conspiracy Abyss Universe, Coatl & Enigma Beyond Code all saw their first plays this month and will have reviews incoming shortly. Four pretty different games, but all pack a pretty good punch in a short play time, with Coatl playing the longest. We had our first remote gathering for gaming in September, when our family and a couple friends and their families met at a centralized location and holed up in an Air BnB and played games for a couple days. It felt good to play games with people we don’t live with again. In all, September was a pretty good month, with 39 total plays, of 29 different games. In total I learned 14 new games in September, the most new games I have played in a long while, let’s look at three of those.Â
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