Game Review: Treasure Trot – Pro-Choice Gaming

By W. Eric Martin
March 17, 2008

Publisher: SimplyFun
Designer: Paul Peterson
Players: 2-4
Ages: 5+
Playing Time: 20 minutes
Rules Language: English

Version: Production copy
Times Played: Four, twice with four players and twice with two

Candy Land is the Trojan Horse of the game world. It looks like a game, it’s sold in the game section of big box retailers – often with a branding tie-in like Dora the Explorer or Winnie the Pooh or Borat – and it’s widely referred to as a child’s first game, yet Candy Land is lacking in one essential feature of all games: choice.

Candy Land is fatalism in a box. When you line up at the start of that psychedelic path, you don’t know who will be blessed with entry into the candy castle, but the outcome has already been determined by fate, by the shuffling of the cards, by the arbitrary decision of who will claim the topmost piece of cardboard. Your pawn advances and retreats like an automaton: “I must go to orange. I must take the Mountain Pass. I must become mired in Molasses Swamp.”

Advocates of Candy Land tout its ability to instill in children a rigid system of following orders. They will learn to take turns, to identify colors, to be a gracious winner or loser – all fine arguments to make when dealing with little humans who have poor impulse control, but does the system have to be that dictatorial to achieve its goals?

Perhaps not. Treasure Trot is one step up the gaming ladder from Candy Land, up from the swamp grass and muck that contains only game-like activities as Treasure Trot gives its players a limited ability to determine their own fate. The gameboard, resembling a modified and muted Candy Land, has a simple loop of pastel spaces. Movement is still dictated by a pedestrian cube; roll it, and you advance a cardboard token along the path, like Russian soldiers slogging through the mud of their homeland, with no apparent will but to follow the system of thought that guides their military leaders and consequently every movement of their tired feet.

When you reach that fated destination, perhaps an unrealistically orange brick decorated with butterflies – their flitting wings mocking the programmed nature of your movement – you might suddenly find yourself with a choice to make. Lifting your stunned head, you find four cards in an array on the gameboard, cards that come in four colors with four symbols on them.

• If that array contains no orange cards, then you can return chin to chest because you have earned nothing; your efforts will be noted with a small checkmark in a logbook that no one will ever review.

• If that array contains but a single orange card, then you can take it and place it before you, treasuring it like the single potato you’re given to eat each day.

• If that array contains two or more orange cards, glory be to all, you get to select which of them will earn a place near your heart – the saddle, perhaps, in an unconscious mirroring of how the state rides you, or maybe the horseshoe to go with your delusion that luck is with you and you’ll return from the front lines with all your limbs intact.

Card or no card, your turn at the plow is done, and the next soldier now moves. Some spaces on the path of your movement contain a precious pink space that allows you to choose any of the four cards on display. Those spaces are rare, so keep your thoughts of them as scarce as the thoughts of your girlfriend back home. Stay focused on the mission, the long-term goal that your masters have set before you: Collect three sets, with each set of three cards matching in color or symbol. Believe it or not, an element of choice has even crept into your mission as you can rearrange the cards as you wish, so the sets once created are not glued that way for all eternity.

If you have survived that small exercise of freedom, you can advance to the reverse of the gameboard and threaten insanity with the extra freedoms to be found there: (1) the ability to choose which of two paths you’ll take as you circumnavigate the board; (2) the discovery of more pink spaces that deliver other actions, such as trading with your neighbors; and (3) the addition of symbols to the colored spaces of the board, granting you the option – something your father never dreamed of – to choose a card that matches either the color of the space or the symbol shown there. Despite the opening of your freedoms, sometimes you’ll still be reduced to cursing the heavens as the choices prove false and nothing can be gained.

Does Treasure Trot achieve its goal? Indoctrinating children in the glories to be earned through their ability to follow orders, while allowing them small, sometimes false, opportunities to make their own choices? A four-year-old named Isabelle summoned the courage to offer this opinion, “I would have liked the game more if I had won and Ben had not won.” A repeat experience brought her the victory that she coveted, along with this new exultation: “I really like this game.” She then cleaned her room, ate all her vegetables (but in an order of her own choosing), and went to sleep without protest. Mission accomplished.

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Comments:

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That might be the best children’s game review I have ever read. If nothing else, next time we slog through a game of Hi Ho! Cherry-O I’ll be able to entertain myself with a stirring internal monologue about conditions on the front where that jerk Yuri keeps getting three potatoes to every one on my dented tin plate. Posted by David Lund on Mar 17, 2008 at 08:41 AM | #

Children Workers of the World, unite!  It is time to throw off your choiceless chains!  Revolution is in the air!  Come join us at Treasure Trot(sky)! Posted by Larry Levy on Mar 17, 2008 at 09:33 AM | #

Hilarious.  Well done! Posted by Nathan Morse on Mar 17, 2008 at 09:44 AM | #

Note that there are the heretics among us who introduce choice in Candyland by dealing hands of three cards (it’s also useful to prohibit moves backwards). Posted by Jeffrey D Myers on Mar 17, 2008 at 10:37 AM | #

Here’s how bad Candyland is:  it’s hard to cheat at.  Why would I want to cheat it when playing my 4-year old nephew?  Because I’d won four times in a row and was promised a reprieve when he won.  I tried sneaking a peek at the top two cards on the deck, so I could take what would have been his card if it would have moved him backwards.  He was too quick for me once and got sent all the way back to the Gumdrops.  Ugh!  Somehow he did finally beat me. Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mar 17, 2008 at 11:55 AM | #

And I thought that this was going to be an abortion rights advocacy game for children. Posted by Jonathan Degann on Mar 17, 2008 at 03:00 PM | #

There are, of course, a lot of board games out there that will teach 5+ year old kids to follow “order and rules”. There’s not much need to tweak Candyland when we have games like Gulo Gulo and Los Mampfos, although it is possible that the “transition” from pure “roll and move” into these in some cases can be made much easier through “roll and move with meaningful choices” like Treasure Trot. From what I can read above, however, my personal choice would be a game that is much more brave in in its departure from CandyLand when introducing choice in roll and move structures. A simple matter such as, for instance, allowing the kids to roll two dice and then choose which one to use (or, even better, to replace dice with cards like in in the race game Ave Caesar) would immediately reduce the level of fatalism (in addition to the set collection described above, or other meaningful goal-oriented mechanics). I’ve seen first-hand (when teaching game design) how elements like these could make it easier for young kids to “let go” of the roll-and-move comfort zone that they are so firmly entrenched in (especially here in the U.S.). Posted by Martin Hagvall on Mar 19, 2008 at 11:06 AM | #

Eric, This is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while.  Thank you for that. When I got to, “If that array contains but a single orange card, then you can take it and place it before you, treasuring it like the single potato you’re given to eat each day.”, I nearly snorted a chocolate chip out of my nose from the cookie I was eating at the time. Posted by Scott Tepper on Mar 24, 2008 at 09:48 AM | #

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