Kris Hall: Training Wheels

The game I’ve been playing a lot recently is Ghost Stories, and the reason I’ve been playing it is simple: my six year old daughter demands it.

She saw me trying a solitaire session of the game, and was quickly fascinated by the deck of ghost cards, and all the grotesque artwork.  She soon insisted on playing.

Now, Ghost Stories does not have overly complex rules, but that doesn’t mean the game is easy.  The one complaint that some folks seem to have with this cooperative game is that it is fairly difficult to win even at the most user-friendly level.  To have even a small chance of succeeding, players must make the best use of their options, and must constantly be destroying the ghosts that accumulate with every turn.  To expect a bright six-year-old to play at this level is asking too much.

Of course, I could always fall into the trap of cooperative games, and become the bossy player-who-really-knows-strategy-and-tells-you-what-to-do-on-every-turn.  I do act this way on occasion.  Of course, there are times in Ghost Stories when only one move makes sense, and I try to point those moments out to my daughter.

“If you don’t fight and kill that ghost, the haunter will haunt another village tile and we lose the game.”

But more often I try to offer a menu of options, and let my daughter select between them.

“Well, there’re no ghosts we have to kill this turn so there’s a bunch of things you could do.  You could go over here and get a Buddha, or you could fight the Fallen Monks, or you could get a life point and a token here—but then we’d have to put another ghost on the board.”

This approach seems to work well, especially when I remember not to throw in my two cents about which option is best.

Already my daughter has picked up the rules to the game, and when I try to point out some of the powers of the tiles, she has a tendency to say “I know that, Daddy.”

It’s hard to find the right balance when the fate of a game is at stake, and I sometimes have to bite my tongue when she chooses a less-than-optimum move.  It’s funny how annoyed I can get when I see that my six-year-old doesn’t have the strategic skills of a veteran gamer.  But it is my daughter who takes the loss of a game in stride, and who simply says “Let’s play again.”

It’s an attitude that I’m trying to cultivate.  Thank heaven I have a patient teacher.

Comments:

< Back Home