The purpose of Candyland is to play a game, without playing a game. It's for toddlers to learn to take turns, to accept negative or positive outcomes without stomping off in a huff, and to play a game with a level playing field between the adults and children... and at the level we are talking about, if there is a meaningful choice at all, then the child, or perhaps rather toddler, will simply lose. It's more than just "following directions", it's the whole set of skills necessary to play a game.
This is why family games have a gradient to them, gradually trading chances for decisions, and gradually expanding the state space, until the game player is ready to join the adults fully with something like Scrabble in the early teens or so. The mentioned Connect 4, for instance, is relatively simple and can be effectively "solved" by an 8 or 9 year old, for instance, so a 8yo and an adult are still not separated by such a large gulf that the game is a joke. Children are actually pretty good at figuring out that they are being "let" win.
If you replace Candyland with something that has any choices at all, you've replaced something other than Candyland.
That said, I'm not saying the progression is optimal as it stands, but if you don't understand the reasons for the enduring popularity of the "standard game loadout", which hasn't seem to have hardly changed in 50 years, you're not going to improve on it properly. And I'd say most of the flaws are on the higher end and solved with things like Settlers of Catan and such, not the children's part of the progression.
Exactly. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Candyland is the best game ever for children of a certain age. I went to great lengths to import a copy here to Norway, and my 4 and 5-year-olds absolutely love it.
The time will come, soon enough, when they want a game that requires them to make decisions, and plot strategy-- and when that day comes, there are plenty of such games to choose from. (My two older daughters both jumped straight to chess when they got to that stage.) But right now, game playing is about the social aspects.
In fact, prior to the arrival of Candyland, my five-year-old (then four) would make us play board games without any rules. She'd roll the dice, and move the pieces around randomly, and have us do the same. That was the part that was fun.
Lately, she's gotten into card games, and her favorite at the moment is a game of her own invention, called "Stop and Go". You divide the cards equally among the players, and each player has a stack, face down. When it is your turn, you turn over the top card. If it is red, you stop. If it is black, you turn over another card, and keep going until you hit a red card. The first person to go through their whole stack wins. No strategy, no decisions-- from a game theory standpoint, it's the same as a lottery drawing-- but that's the beauty of it.
Your comment reminds me of when I used to play Trivial Pursuit with my family (all much older) when I was eight or so. Of course I hardly knew anything at the time, but quickly cottoned on to the fact that "Hitler" seemed to be the answer more often than anything else, so I'd just answer "Hitler" to anything I didn't know.
I've never understood trivial pursuit. Every single science question can be easily answered by anyone with a fourth grade education could answer, and yet all the other categories involve things like obscure B movies from the 1930s that no one has ever heard of.
Well then, it's possible that your distribution of knowledge is atypical.
Besides, most people have forgotten most of what they knew in fourth-grade science, unfortunately. I recently gave a talk about planetary science to a classroom full of seven-year-olds, and was astonished how many random facts some of them seemed to know.
Kid: "How many moons does Jupiter have?"
Me: "Well, there's four large ones, and quite a number of smaller ones. We're still discovering new ones, and the smallest ones are only a kilometer or so in diamet..."
Kid: "Sixty-three!"
I checked when I got home, and damn, he was right, there are currently 63 known moons of Jupiter. I research Jupiter for a living and I didn't know that, but this seven-year-old kid did.
The conclusion I always drew was, logically speaking, when Trivial Pursuit was created it must be that 4th grade science was about as well-known as slightly outdated pop trivia.
When I have opened up this debate among friends, your counter point is the one brought up the most. I think they can learn taking turns and accepting outcomes while making decisions, even if at the start those decisions are random. Even if I concede that Candyland has a place in the progression, kids jump past it so fast I wonder if it is even worth including.
Well, obviously you have a good relationship with your 3yo if she enjoys playing an adversarial game with you, but not all kids are the same.
My son is 12 and still enjoyed Candyland and Chutes and Ladders as late as last year (while also starting to like Clue and Monopoly). The risk-free social aspect of a non-game game like Candyland is really important for some kids; it's really more of a role-playing situation for the whole social dynamic of playing a game in a small group than anything else.
My daughter, now, with her you're right - she tired of Candyland pretty quick. As everything with kids: it depends on the kid.
How do you plan on addressing the problem of the result of the game being a forgone conclusion if you include meaningful choices, pretty much by definition of "meaningful"? That's the core of my point, not really the learning or discipline bits, and there's a certain mathematical inevitability about it; choices -> adults winning against young children. Or having to throw the game, and kids aren't dumb, they notice that.
Don't play as adversaries, then. The original article suggests a simplified role-playing game, where the adult effectively just implements the game mechanics and acts as a GM. You don't have to structure it like an RPG, but any game with meaningful choices that remains balanced will have a similar structure: the adult implementing a game for the kid. That's not "throwing the game", that's redefining the idea of the game.
Consider that the job of a GM isn't to beat the players by any means possible, but to make a fun game with the right level of challenge. In an adversarial situation you'd call that "throwing the game". But in a game where the GM simply implements the game mechanics, they just act as an infinitely flexible interpreter of desired actions and generator of sensible results. In other words, you've implemented a single-player game for the kid(s).
That said, I do think "games" like Candyland have a place; they're just really uninteresting as games. They do something interesting and allow interaction. So do toys that light up or make noise when you interact with them. Candyland demonstrates a structured form of interaction, and a concept of game rules (moving your token according to defined rules rather than just marching it across the board as you please). Calling it a "game" is a stretch, but that doesn't make it worthless.
Josh nails it here. The whole reason I created Dungeon Adventure was because I didn't like the "no choice" games and the adversarial choice games couldn't engage both of us. Connect4 against a 4 year old is fun a few times, but then gets old.
My simple RPG allowed me to have fun building the dungeon and setting up the scenario and my daughter has a blast smashing the monsters, collecting the treasures and saving the day. Kids that age really respond to following a story, which isn't available in any board game I've come across.
As far as decisions, there are tons even without introducing extra things. You have to:
1. Decide which hero attacks which monster (gang up vs spread attacks out strategies)
2. Decide which paths to take through the dungeon
3. Decide which heroes get which items you find.
4. Decide when to buy and use food
Could we fix Candyland? I would give the kid 4 cards to hold in their deck and let them choose a card to play each turn. At the end of each turn you draw another from the top so you always have 4. You'll learn all about taking turns and following directions while seeing how your choices affect the game.
The game "Sorry" has a similar variant in the manual, listed as "for adults": instead of drawing a card and immediately using it, you keep a hand of cards and draw one and play one each turn. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry!_%28game%29#Variations . Doing the same with Candyland would make sense once the players know how to play the basic game.
Actually, I'd pretty much agree with you wholesale. The only thing I'd further add is that there should be both adversarial and non-adversarial gaming in the mix. There is a certain element of maturity building you get out of adversarial "gaming" with Candyland that non-adversarial gaming either can't introduce, or will have a much harder time introducing, and vice versa.
What if the game incorporates so much randomness that the best possible decisions still only win two games of every three against the worst possible decisions?
Meaningful is not strictly equivalent to influencing the outcome. Imagine a typical "racing" game where players advance along a track. The track could incorporate forks such that mathematically, all choices are equivalent. But the entertainment value of the forks may differ. Some children may want to cut through the "garden," others through the "playground."
If they're all perfectly equivalent then even very young kids will catch on to that quickly. Here's an improvement: make the choices equal in EV but different in variance. That adds a little bit of strategy: take the predictable choices when you're ahead and the risky ones when you're behind. Nonetheless, a child with no concept of this strategy can sometimes win against an adult who plays optimally.
N.B.: I was home-schooled through preschool. My mother designed a bunch of board games that she used to teach me basic math. Then I got to kindergarten and got introduced to Chutes & Ladders. I saw through it immediately and got into arguments with my classmates about what a stupid game it was.
The game you just described is Chutes and Ladders, but with choices.
Could easily be implemented by having two dice, a "safe" die and a "risky" die. On your turn you only roll one die (you choose which one) - the risky die you move ONLY when the number would land you on a chute or ladder, otherwise you stay put. The safe die you move no matter what, and chutes/ladders do not apply to you wherever you land.
Most games are bad, but there are plenty of good old games. Tic-tac-toe, soccer, chess, go, nine men's morris, fanorona, alquerque, checkers, truco, canasta, gin rummy, pool, the numerous variations of mancala (wari, kalah, and dozens of others), shogi, gomoku ("Pente"), reversi ("Othello"), chinese checkers, and on and on.
So I think your statement, "It's only really in the late 80's early 90's stuff really developed in the board game world," really misses the mark. It's true that the US had a deeply impoverished board-game culture for decades, especially with regard to kids' boardgames. And it's true that we're in the middle of an unprecedented explosion of excellent boardgames. But there were already a number of excellent boardgames in existence.
> The mentioned Connect 4, for instance, is relatively simple and can be effectively "solved" by an 8 or 9 year old, for instance, so a 8yo and an adult are still not separated by such a large gulf that the game is a joke.
Interesting post, but your Connect 4 game sounds extremely, extremely poor:)
This is why family games have a gradient to them, gradually trading chances for decisions, and gradually expanding the state space, until the game player is ready to join the adults fully with something like Scrabble in the early teens or so. The mentioned Connect 4, for instance, is relatively simple and can be effectively "solved" by an 8 or 9 year old, for instance, so a 8yo and an adult are still not separated by such a large gulf that the game is a joke. Children are actually pretty good at figuring out that they are being "let" win.
If you replace Candyland with something that has any choices at all, you've replaced something other than Candyland.
That said, I'm not saying the progression is optimal as it stands, but if you don't understand the reasons for the enduring popularity of the "standard game loadout", which hasn't seem to have hardly changed in 50 years, you're not going to improve on it properly. And I'd say most of the flaws are on the higher end and solved with things like Settlers of Catan and such, not the children's part of the progression.