Friday, February 2, 2018

Mastermind and Deck Building with a four-year-old


We’ve had a couple interesting steps in teaching our son games.

The other night, he saw me playing Ascension on the iPad and wanted to know more. I did my best to explain how deck builders work to him and what each pile of cards meant.

It probably would have worked better with actual physical cards :P And Ascension also is kind of beyond a four-year-old’s reading level. Still, I appreciated his interest and he got some of the concepts.

I do wonder what a deck builder designed for folks too young would be like. Maybe a color-based game where the goal is to lay down a rainbow of cards with each color having a simple symbol on it. A card to draw a card, a hand to play another card or a dollar sign to add another card from the stock cards to your discard pile. Actually, I can see a lot of problems but it’s an idea.

We had much better luck teaching him Mastermind for Kids. Mommy helped him put together codes for Daddy to solve and showing how to assess each of Daddy’s answers. He didn’t have it quite down but he was most of the way there. 

Actually, over the last couple months, his interest and understanding of games has been increasing. Dare I hope for Castles of Burgundy by the summer :P

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