Though I don’t have children of my own, I get along well with kids and generally enjoy spending time with them. In particular, I find it fascinating to inhabit, as well as I can, their worlds for little bits of time and see how different their perspectives are from mine. Because games and game theory are such a big part of my life, I find it especially interesting to play games with kids of various ages to see how what they do and don’t understand about strategy, how they make various sorts of decisions, etc.
There are three kids in particular with whom I spend a lot of time. They’re all brothers, the sons of my cousin, and I’ve seen them at least a few times a year for the last five years or so. When it comes to playing games with children, they are my primary research subjects, and it’s interesting to see how their approaches to various games differ based on their ages and personalities.
Perhaps the biggest thing I’ve learned from them is that their reasons for playing games are quite different from my own. Because I enjoy strategic thinking and find game theory interesting, my favorite games (like poker) involve lots of nuance and meaningful decisions with uncertain outcomes.
Of course, for young children in particular, this kind of thinking is not on their radar at all. Consequently, I’ve suffered through my share of War, Candyland, and other games that involve no meaningful decisions whatsoever (assuming one isn’t trying to take advantage of inevitably marked cards).
Why do children enjoy these games? I believe it is for reasons that they share with many recreational poker players: they enjoy manipulating aesthetically pleasing game pieces (it’s no coincidence that casino chips are brightly colored and have a pleasing size and weight), reveling in the ups and downs that follow from the turn of a card (gambling, essentially, even if there’s nothing of value on the line), and engaging with other people in a friendly and/or competitive pursuit.
That’s certainly not to say that recreational poker players play exclusively for these reasons, as many are also deeply interested in poker’s strategic complexity and enjoy matching wits against others on such a battlefield. Nor is it to say that the above has no appeal to professional poker players, most of whom could after all probably make more money in a different field if maximizing income were really their only objective.
Anyone interested in making money from poker, however, would do well to think explicitly about what people who are willing to lose money at poker are getting out of the exchange. Some may simply be delusional about their ability to win money, but I think most have other objectives as well. Understanding what those interests are can both help you play better against those players and, more broadly, help you help them meet those objectives, which is the key to keeping satisfied “customers” willing to play in games where they are at a strategic disadvantage.
Smash Up
My aforementioned primary research subjects are currently 10, 7, and 3. Given our disparate ages, abilities, and interests, it can be tough to find a game that all of us will enjoy playing. Of course this can be resolved by playing games with them individually or by letting them take turns choosing games, but those are both unideal solutions.
One of our best mutually satisfying gaming experiences was with a game called Smash Up that really is too complicated for all but the oldest boy. The details of the game aren’t terribly important. The main thing you need to know is that it’s a card game in which each player chooses two factions from choices such as Wizards, Ninjas, Pirates, and Dragons and mixes the cards from those two factions together to create his deck. Those decks are then used to score points by vying for control of various “bases” in ways that often involve complicated card interactions.
It’s a sufficiently complex game that the youngest boy, Walter, can’t really grasp the strategy of it all, and the middle boy, Oliver, knows just enough to recognize that he consistently gets his butt kicked by his older brother, Henry. Although I would enjoy the strategy of the game if I could play it one-on-one against Henry, in a multi-player game my efforts mostly go towards resolving conflicts and keeping the game moving without tears or fighting, so I can’t really sink my teeth into its complexity. For that reason, I generally try to avoid playing Smash Up with them.
I happened to be at their house one day when a package arrived from UPS, though. It was an expansion set for Smash Up, introducing five new factions, that Oliver had purchased with birthday money. The arrival of this expansion was a long-awaited event for the boys, and there was no question that we would be playing with it just as soon as the plastic wrapping could be torn off.
Although Henry won handily, it was a fun session for everyone because we all had our own “victory conditions” that were not mutually exclusive. Henry, who was 9 at the time, is highly competitive, so winning was the most important thing to him. Because the game involves a lot of strategy and he was better at it than anyone else, he was virtually assured of meeting his victory condition.
Oliver is also very competitive, and so his primary victory condition is often at odds with Henry’s. In this case, though, he wanted to play with his new cards more than anything else. So although he would have liked to have won, he was satisfied simply to play with his new toy.
Walter can’t even really grasp the rules of the game, but he likes to be included in things that his older brothers and I are doing. He especially likes Smash Up because of the artwork on the cards. He and I played on a team, and he mostly just got excited to look at cards with awesome pictures of fire-breathing dragons. I let him choose which cards we would play on each turn, intervening mostly just to ensure that our actions were within the rules. We had no chance of winning, but this “strategy” satisfied his primary victory condition of having fun with cool toys and feeling included in something that his favorite people were doing.
I can also be competitive, and in many circumstances having a chance of winning would be important to me. When it comes to playing games with this crew, though, winning takes a backseat to enjoying their company and to thinking about meta-concepts such as how the kids are making their choices and what they are each getting out of the game. So, because everyone else was happy and the game ended without tears, I met my primary victory condition.
Risk
As an older brother myself, I remember how frustrating it was trying to play complex games with someone three years younger. Often, by the time we completed the set-up of the game, my little brother would have gotten bored and moved on to something else, leaving me frustrated and with no one to play with.
Frankly, I consider Risk a poorly designed game that takes entirely too long to complete, so I wasn’t eager to play it. But Henry and Oliver were playing, and Henry rightly feared that Oliver was going to quite shortly after the board was set up, so I agreed to play as well.
For those who don’t know, Risk is a world domination-themed game where each player pays the part of a great power. Players get armies that they can deploy to various countries across the globe and use both to attack adjacent territories and to defend from attacks. The results of an attack are determined with dice, but ties go to the defender, so it behooves the attacking player to outnumber the defender before attempting an invasion.
When playing games with just the older boys, I do my best to work some discussion of strategy into our play. So when Oliver, on his first turn, attempted a series of kamikaze invasions against territories where defenders outnumbered his attackers, I attempted to explain to him why this was ill-advised.
He didn’t want to hear it, though, and after losing the majority of his units, he became frustrated and quit in tears. “He always does that,” Henry told me. “He plays one turn and then quits.”
That’s when it hit me: Oliver’s kamikaze strategy was not actually an irrational one if he was never going to play more than one turn anyway. He was plainly bored by the time set-up was complete, so why not just roll as many dice as possible and blow up his armies in a blaze of glory before quitting? What value did they hold for him anyway?
Most of us have seen a similar mentality in the poker room, when a player is clearly ready to quit and go home. Of course in a cash game players can just cash out their remaining chips, but even then a surprising number seem to prefer to blow them up in a blaze of glory.
I have actually played poker with Henry and Oliver several times, but that will have to be the subject of another article….