Inside Strategic Space

When I was growing up in a small college town in the middle of Southern Wisconsin farmlands, I thought Christmas was all about games.  With the exception of an action figure or a model car or book every now and then, my Christmas wish list was usually filled with board games.  I remember playing Othello and Sorry and Life and Monopoly and Masterpiece and Trouble with my sisters and friends throughout the year, but especially on the holidays when so many potential game players were together!

I have two nephews only 7 and 4 and two nieces 12 and 7, so only the eldest is in the range of the games I like to play right now.  She doesn’t seem to have the enthusiasm (or patience?) for board games, preferring, as many of her generation do, games on her dad’s PC and on her own Nintendo DS.  She seems to enjoy simulations and dexterity games with her video games and not the competition of strategy games so much.

So when we’re all here back at Mom’s, we usually have only the couple of hours between when the kids go to bed and when the adults start nodding off to break out the cards, the dominoes, or the board games.  Fortunately, we can usually count on my mom, both my sisters, and my brother-in-law to join in the games, unless one of the kids is not going peacefully into dreamland.  In that case, it’s usually four playing and one alternate.

My mom is a huge fan of word games.  She loves crosswords and games like Boggle.  She also likes party games, or, as she puts it, “games where everybody is shouting and excited.”

My sisters are both pretty stressed out with juggling working and parenting duties and usually prefer games that don’t take long to play and don’t require too much concentration.  Card games and dominoes seem to be about their speed at the end of a long day.

My brother-in-law spends hours at a time on computer games, like Civilization, which for those of you who don’t know it is a combination of strategy war game, trading, area control, and resource allocation.  He, like me, is often open to a lot of different types of games.

I’ll let you know how it works out this week when we’re all together.  Mom has copies of 4th Corner, Zombie Attack, and Deer Hunter 2050, and I brought the prototypes of Assorti and Samsara.  Since Assorti is simple enough, I’m hoping I can get the two 7-year-olds involved in that one at least.  Once Star Hopper is out, they would probably enjoy that one too.

I find in my designing that my attention goes back and forth between games I can play with my young relatives and those that will entice my adult friends.  It has shaped my philosophy toward game design toward games that emphasize a variety of mechanics and themes to appeal to the widest variety of game players.  And given the short window of time we have after the kids go to bed, I am quite aware of the need for games and rule variations that can be played more quickly and learned more quickly.  (Talking to toy store owners and potential sales reps and others in the industry lately, I’ve honed my summaries of all my games down to 15 seconds and my explanations of the rules to under 90 seconds!)

I hadn’t considered how important fitting a time frame was until just recently.  Some times you have to fit a game in during a 45-minute class period.

In the past couple of weeks, we’ve donated games to schools in Pennsylvania and New Mexico to help teachers fighting to teach children how to interact through board games, when the isolation of video gaming is turning more and more youngsters into asocial recluses.  The teachers believe, as I do, that board games are much more than mere entertainment.  They teach how to follow rules, how to wait for your turn, how to plan ahead, how to accept wins and defeats gracefully, how to negotiate, how to deal with surprises and setbacks, and the importance of working together for a time instead of holding fast to self-interest.

And if we brought up a generation of young people who had thoroughly learned those skills, what a great gift to give the world!

Mark Salzwedel