Hating on Candyland: Why most games for kids are awful | Hacker News Reader

Hating on Candyland: Why most games for kids are awful

kidsdungeonadventure.com

54 pointsbengarvey61 comments

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.

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.

Thanks for reading and responding, though.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I just fixed Candyland. You're welcome, Hasbro.

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.

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.

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.

Trivial Pursuit is candyland for grownups.

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.

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.

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.

Definitely my favorite comment on the article.

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.

> 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:)

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.

EDIT: for clarity.

I am reminded of the childhood favorite card game, "War," also a game of pure chance.

In `A Theory of Fun`, Raph Koster writes about games being learning and teaching tools. When my brother and I would play 'soldiers' growing up, we were safely simulating, and learning from, what it would be like to be a warrior (evolutionarily, a useful identity). I always like the idea that Candyland was a game game -- it's a game to teach kids how to play games.

It's a really spectacular book; I learned a lot from it despite not being a game designer: http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1932...

Raph Koster is one of a few remarkably unique minds in game design. He "gets" virtual worlds like almost nobody else does; dig around on raphkoster.com for some of his writing on the subject.

Ultima Online in 1997 was so far ahead of its time, nothing quite like it has been made since. Some games have fumbled around with elements of UO, like open PvP or player housing or crafting, but nothing has ever captured its real essence: feeling like a living world with a wide variety of people, not just fantasy hero cutouts.

You could spend months in the world without killing a single monster, just mining and blacksmithing and selling your wares to make money to buy a house. And it was fun! You could wear clothes just for aesthetic reasons, not because they gave you +1 dexterity. They got so many subtle details so right. It makes me sad that "immersion" now basically just means "pretty 3D world".

Ah, but you can make decisions in these games.

Years ago I was teaching English in Japan to a 6-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 3-year-old. We were playing some utterly moronic game where the kids took turns drawing cards, having me read the letter of the alphabet they drew, and then moving their pawn as appropriate.

It was really more for the younger kids, so the 6-year-old made a decision: he attempted to cheat! He simply moved his pawn forward ten squares or so when he guessed we weren't looking.

Regrettably for him, we were indeed all looking at the board. He offered to move his pawn back the ten spaces, but no, it was back to the beginning for him.

I've got to say, I find even Monopoly to be a terrible game. My strategy for the game can be summed up as: "buy the property if I can, otherwise pay rent if I have to".

I almost never stray from that strategy, and even when I do, it's not like those exceptions make the game any more interesting.

I know what you mean. It doesn't get interesting until you start making deals and trades with the other players, especially when everyone agrees to relax the rules a little. The plotting starts to get messy as you try to figure out who is getting screwed worse in a given deal, or when you have to work out three-way trades.

I find a much better game if you're into "deals" is Risk. You know you've had fun when the cleanup involves finding all the pieces that were put on ballistic paths in the final forfeit gesture of the game... good times.

Risk is incredibly frustrating, though. I cannot tell you how many times 18-man armies have been mowed down by lone men

Are you playing the Spartan version of Risk, by any chance?

You can have pretty interesting Monopoly games. Mine usually end up with interplayer corporations, loans for building and investing, bailouts, mergers and similar.

At this point you aren't really playing Monopoly anymore. You've developed your own game using the Monopoly pieces.

As long as everyone plays by the game rules, any out-of-game interactions (such as agreeing to pool money and property) don't mean you're not playing monopoly any more.

To prove your point, you can buy or trade for one of each color property. Then announce "I refuse to grant any monopolies ever, it is highly unlikely this game will end in finite time" These kind of things are not possible in a modern, well-designed game.

You are not playing optimally. Monopoly is far from perfect, but there is some more depth than that.

Here's two questions: - How many houses is optimal for most sets? - Would you rather have both utilities or two railroads?

That's the point though; you don't have to play optimally, doing so doesn't really make the game any more interesting.

Whenever some player doesn't buy a property and it goes up for auction, the players' bids are interestingly strategic. The optimal strategy at that point is not to "buy the property if you can", at least in a game of more than two players — two players using that strategy will bankrupt each other quickly, paying $3000 for Vermont Avenue and the like, and someone else will win. (It's probably not the optimal strategy in a two-player game either, but that's not as obvious.)

If the other players will bid less than the sticker price, then it's a better strategy to decline the sticker price and pick the property up in the ensuing auction. Under some circumstances (e.g. all the other players are broke) you can pick it up for a song in this case.

For those who are fuzzy on the rules: http://richard_wilding.tripod.com/monorules.htm

Are you sure you aren't thinking about the children's variant of Monopoly?

Monopoly proper is all about trading, which is in turn all about risk management, probabilities, and leveraging your holdings. If your strategy for Monopoly can be summed up as "buy the property if I can, otherwise pay rent if I have to", you aren't actually playing the game.

Oh?

Mine, at least until people cotton onto it, is to be a "Slum Landlord." I buy and trade for the cheapest sets I can find, and then I put four houses on each property. Remember, they're slums, so you don't expect hotels. If I can corner the market on houses[1], no matter what the other players do, they can't bankrupt me with rents because they can't improve their properties.

This doesn't work in a game where people ignore the housing shortage rule, of course. But If you toss that rule out, I don't think you're playing Monopoly any more.

[1]: There are 32 houses, so if you own 21 houses, it is impossible for anyone else to upgrade a three property group to hotels. If you own 25 houses, no other player can upgrade any group. It's fairly easy for two players to control the property market and kill the other players off.

The limitation on housing is the key to the game's structure. Most people don't seem to play it this way (letting players build hotels if they have the money, regardless of the number of actual plastic houses remaining), and it screws the game up. Not to mention house rules like "free parking" artificially adding money to the game.

I think they play it that way because the houses always get lost, so you never know how many there really are supposed to be. So you use stand-in pieces, with no limit.

Well, every set I've ever had came with extras, and the number you're supposed to use is printed right there in the instructions.

Assuming you didn't loose the instructions too......

Monopoly's instructions are printed on cardboard and are part of the box. Hard to lose unless you are loose with that sort of thing.

Not in mine. Mine came on a tiny booklet.

If you lose the instructions then the odds are there are many other rules you're not following.

Whenever I play people almost never want to trade with me, especially for a set.

When I read your comment I started tinking about Settlers of Catan. I think SoC is more interesting than Monopoly, but there is still way too much luck involved for my taste. I have been trying to come up with a way to take the luck out of SoC, but haven't come up with a good way yet. Of course, one might need to stray quite a bit from the original design. Any ideas?

Some of these might help:

http://boardgamegeek.com/forum/2017/the-settlers-of-catan/va...

Full disclosure: I abhor Monopoly.

The "fun" part of Monopoly is trading with other players. It's actually a pretty acceptable game as far as diplomacy goes. The worst problem with the game is that it very quickly devolves into a situation where two players have a decent chance to win, everyone else is royally screwed, and the game still has about an hour to go. Also, it's terribly reliant on luck: while it is possible to actually be good at Monopoly(i.e. there are strategies and skills that will seriously increase your chances of winning), a few bad rolls and/or a player adamant about not selling X property or trading Y player (this happens a lot IME) can leave you completely out of the game.

> it very quickly devolves into a situation where two players have a decent chance to win, everyone else is royally screwed, and the game still has about an hour to go.

In that situation you can play the two big players off against each other. Offer a deal with Big Player 1 that benefits you (e.g. allowing you to get a group) and tell him that if he refuses, you'll sell all your assets to Big Player 2 for $1.

A suggestion to you and anyone else who doesn't like Monopoly - given the chance, try the video game versions of it. The game progresses much faster, the standard rules are enforced, and you'll start seeing the strategy of the game peeking through behind the monotony of dice roles and rent payments.

It's all about getting monopolies, and preventing other players from doing so. Luck is still part of the game, but certain parts of the game (go to jail, advance to nearest unsold property/boardwalk) give weight to certain parts of the board.

In our household, we like to play with the speed die, which adds an additional strategy that I like: It forces players to advance to the nearest unsold property, or if all are sold, it advances the players to the nearest unmortgaged property.

This is off the topic of the actual post, but the concept of Kids Dungeon Adventure is just awesome. I'm getting this to play with a friend of mine and her 5 year old daughter -- we play games whenever I'm in town, but I've never felt they tapped into her (mindblowingly amazing) creativity and imagination. Great job, Ben; we need more of this!

Thanks and I hope you like it! Send me the pics of your dungeon and I'll post them up on the blog.

Absolutely will do. Gonna head out there in a couple weeks and give it a try. Can't wait to try it -- brings me back to the days of sitting around with friends in elementary school and creating our own little RPGs.

What's wrong with 'terrible' games like Candyland existing? Choices are not things that ONLY happen in games. When kids are ready, they'll move up.

When I was a kid, I chose not to play Candyland. I chose to play Battleship and Stratego and Checkers and Chess and (much later) Magic.

Really excited about Dungeon Adventure. Going to have to sort out how to make it run well with multiple children controlling the heroes. Mostly, how not to be biased in dealing out monster attacks to the heroes. Possible monster 'strategy': attack whoever just attacked you. If you weren't attacked, attack whoever dealt the most damage to your monster buddies in the last roll. For when the monsters have initiative, make the order of the heroes walking through the dungeon significant--whoever's in the lead gets attacked first, giving them the opportunity to collectively decide to put the healthiest guy in the front, or let one person keep the protection ring in exchange for always taking the lead, or put the weakest in front to watch him die (or trade him out for a new hero) or whatever.

Great! Make sure you send me a pic of the dungeon you guys create. I'm always looking for new ideas.

Tom Vasel, of Dice Tower, reviewed Candyland. After reviewing 999 other games, his daughters pretty much bullied him into doing a video for Candyland. He panned it and rightfully so, but he also spent some time on what makes it so appealing to children. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tas5aCeNgEU

Other than the hundreds of other kids games that offer better alternatives, he also suggested letting each player draw four cards and choose which one to play. This way, there's still a lot of luck and the kids will still win sometimes, but it's not completely passive.

I have to agree with Tom. It's hard like a game that gives kids no choices. In life people do have choices.

warning: paypal gripe ahead

looks like a great idea (his game) so I decide for $6 it's worth a shot. My only payment choice is cc via PayPal, but PayPal are demanding my home address ("Please note we do not accept PO Boxes. If we are unable to match your address against Australia Post records, we may ask you to verify it by providing documentation."), full name and valid home phone number.

Sorry, but they're not getting them. I'm still interested in the game though.

My family has found Gamewright to be one of a handful of companies that have games that both children and adults can enjoy. http://amzn.to/gIh8gU

We still own the "traditional" childhood games mentioned in the article but rarely play them.

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