Christmas gaming
Dec. 31st, 2012 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quarrelI had the privilege of playing a couple of board games with my almost-middle-school-age niece over Christmas break.
The first was the classic Sorry! In short, I have little to praise it for. It looks and plays like the 80-year-old game it is.
It has a couple of official rules kludges to make it less clunky. In the “quick start” version, everyone begins with one pawn already out. I’m not surprised to see this rule since only 24% of the deck actually lets you begin playing in the standard game. If no one else has moved yet either, that drops to 16%.
There’s also a “Variation for Adults” (their term, not mine!) that combines the above rule, a five-card hand to play from instead of requiring random plays from the top of the deck, and a scoring system for tracking performance over multiple games to a finer degree than simply counting wins. It’s allegedly actually interesting for experienced gamers, according to comments on boardgamegeek.com. I don’t know whether that’s true, but I do know that the basic game is not a good game for kids. It’s not just the rules. It’s everything.
It’s frustrating for kids (and anyone else!) to do nothing. In basic Sorry!, players are able to move on fewer than half their turns throughout the early and late stages of the game.
It’s frustrating for anyone, especially kids, to be set back. There’s a lot of setting back in Sorry! (In fact, that’s its tagline.) It’s also frustrating for kids to need to set each other back because a lot of kids don’t enjoy doing things that feel mean.
The movement cards are poorly designed in the edition I played. The most prominent element on them is the main movement number. That’s horrible when half the cards have an alternate use that’s equally important, usually unrelated to the main number, and represented only as a small text message. Oh, also one of the cards only moves you backward, but its number is displayed just like all the forward-moving ones. And some of the cards with multiple uses require you to use any legal option whether you want to or not, while others don’t, and you have to read the rules to know which are which.
There was one bright moment: my niece is a game designer! She explained the Police variant she created. Take the four red pawns and put them on the corners. Any player who lands there gets sent home. She was inspired by Monopoly having a Jail on a corner square. (Yes, yes, I know landing on Monopoly’s Jail by a normal move does not penalize you. Work with me here. She’s only ten.) Obviously it only works with less than four players, and no one can play red.
The other game we played was the fully card-based word game Quiddler, which I brought deliberately as an extra Christmas present because A) I know my niece is a precocious reader, and B) I know her parents buy lousy games like Sorry! I played by custom kid-friendly rules: only go five rounds instead of eight, ignore the bonus point rules, and don’t bother shuffling between rounds — just keep digging into the deck. It was fun for all of us, and she actually edged me out 85 to 82 through sheer luck. I don’t even think I could have Scrabble-cheesed her and come out ahead.
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Date: 2013-01-06 08:04 am (UTC)