Kids’ Games and Clades

Air Land Sea is my only perfect game.
Also great for kids.

Most of my adult life, my livelihood has been creating sophisticated games for adults. Some games were artsy, like Over the Edge. Others were commercial endeavors, as when I led the redesign of Dungeons & Dragons and helped revive the sagging brand. At the same time that I was creating commercial games for strangers, I was also creating free games for kids, actually for my daughter as she grew up. These projects were “for fun” games that few people have heard about. It’s something new and exciting for me to do a professional game that’s kid-friendly, and that’s what Clades is. This post describes some of my kid games that, in some way, led up to Clades.

Twenty Guesses

If you play Twenty Questions with kids, you will discover that they would rather make guesses than reframe their guesses as yes-or-no questions. So how do you play Twenty Questions with little children? Turn it into “Twenty Guesses”. Instead of trying to get little kids to form yes-or-no questions, let them do what they want to do and just makes guesses. The trick is in how the grownup with the “secret” answers the guess. The grownup gives one hint about how the guess is “right” and another about how the guess is “wrong”. This structure models abstract categorization for little children, and they get it. Here’s a hypothetical example.

Grownup: OK, I’m thinking of something. [secretly thinking “monkey”] 

Kid 1: Is it a car? 

Grownup: No, like a car, it can move from one place to another, but unlike a car it’s alive. 

Kid 2: Is it a dog? 

Grownup: It is a mammal, like a dog, but it’s not usually kept as a pet. 

Kid 1: A cat! 

Grownup: Remember, people don’t usually have them as pets, but they are furry and they have tails. 

Kid 3: A beaver. 

Grownup: It has hair and a tail like a beaver, but it doesn’t live in the water. It lives in the trees.

Kid 2: A three-toed sloth!

Grownup: Remember, it has a tail, but it does live in the jungle, like a sloth does. It jumps around a lot more than a sloth. 

Kid 3: A monkey! 

Grownup: Right.

For more discussion of this variant on Twenty Questions, see my web page on this game, where I called the game “Guessit”.

Spaceship

A finished game of Spaceship

Little kids love this game because they make real, tactical decisions that help them win most games. Plus they get to draw spaceships, plus they get to scribble all over the grownup’s spaceship. To play, each player draws a spaceship, with weaponry. Then you play in rounds until one player has shot the other player’s spaceship four times. Each round starts with the child rolling a die. The child chooses to keep the die with the number it rolled, or give the die to the grownup. The child physically places the die on the spaceship with the number up. Then the grownup rolls a second die and places it on the other spaceship. If your spaceship has a number at least as big as the other spaceship’s number, you shoot the enemy ship. You can draw an explosion on the enemy spaceship, indicating about 1/4 destruction. A spaceship is destroyed if it’s hit four times. If both players get to 4 at the same time, it’s a draw.

This game is the simplest way I can think of to give a quite small child real tactical choices with instant consequences, good or bad. Spaceship is a little-kid version of Air, Land, and Sea.

For more information, here’s the link to my web page on this game.

Air Land Sea

Update: The end state of an improvised miniatures game that
adapted the Air Land Sea mechanic. This is the 4-year old’s
army. He tied the 10-year old.

This remarkable little work is the only perfect game I’ve ever done. It uses the Spaceship mechanic, except that there are 12 locations to place a die result. Each environment—air, land, or sea—has two locations on each player’s side. Your total value for each environment equals your two numbers multiplied together. You win if, after 12 dice rolls, your total is higher than the other player’s total in two or three environments.  Anyone can start playing with a few seconds’ worth of instruction, and you can complete a match in a minute or two. Even though the game is this simple, it has a distinct beginning phase, middle, and end. Some moves are easy to make, but other rolls give you choices that are painful. I invented this game as a way to teach multiplication, but you can simplify it by switching to addition or even dropping the arithmetic altogether.

For more about this game, here’s my original page about it.

Clever observers might see a resemblance between the three environments in Air Land Sea, the three theaters in Richard Garfield’s Star Wars card game, and the three environments in Clades.

Princess

This simple card game was all about the central question of poker: should I put more money in and vie for the pot, or should I cut my losses and fold? This relates directly to the other important question: are they bluffing? The top card in the custom deck is the Princess, thus the name of the game. This game was not a hit, but even a failed experiment teaches you something. Maybe if I made kids actually bet money, they’d find it more engaging, but I’m not sure that’s a great idea. In creating games for grownups, Rob Heinsoo makes use of a similar tension—to vie for the pot or not—in his grownup games Three Dragon Ante and Night Eternal.

Checkers variants

Checkers is a great game for a grownup and a child to play competitively against each other. Unlike chess, the game plays perfectly well with some of the grownup’s pieces removed. This asymmetry gives the game momentum, in that the grownup starts behind but might pull ahead. Both players can try as hard as they can to win, and the grownup can increase or decrease the child’s advantage just by starting with more or fewer pieces. To keep the game from dragging on, have a player win when they have more queens than the other player has pieces (regular pieces plus crowned pieces). Since I played with my daughter, the crowned pieces were queens, and the uncrowned “men” were princesses.

Here’s my original page on checkers.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game

For years I’ve puzzled over how one could create an evolution game that has solid science behind it. My answer is Clades. It works by playing to kids’ natural inclination to categorize animals, and it teaches that the way to understand an animal’s place in this world is to understand its evolutionary history. Like many of the games I’ve described here, it works great when grownups play with kids. For example, since most of the cards are face-up on the table, it’s easy for a grownup to help younger players.

In 2016, artist Karen Lewis and I returned to Kickstarter to raise money for Clades, and we raised enough to produce a “dinosaur” version, Clades Prehistoric. You can play the games separately or together. Clades and Clades Prehistoric are available from Atlas Games or (better yet) from your friendly local brick-and-mortar store. 

Clades and Clades Prehistoric available from Atlas Games

2016

YouTube video from 2 years ago

Direct Dialog on Religion

Daniel Dennett has long promoted rules for criticizing honestly instead of insultingly. For example, you should start by stating your opponent’s position clearly, in terms that your opponent would use. This exercise demonstrates that you understand the position you’re about to criticize, not attacking a straw man*. It also sets a tone of exceptional reasonableness. Recently, the idea of “steel manning" seems to be gaining attention, and that’s in the same ballpark as the rules Dennett popularizes. Steel manning means addressing the opponent’s position in its strongest terms. Usually we caricature an opponent’s view without ever realizing we’re doing it. We honestly state our judgments, and we don’t try to caricature anyone else’s view, but the caricature starts in our own heads, so it’s almost impossible to avoid. On the other hand, if you intentionally make a “steel man” argument and address the opponent’s strongest points honestly, you overcome the reflexive tendency to caricature the opponent’s view. Sam Harris has made arduous efforts to communicate across lines of disagreement, and he has suffered some dramatic failures. He’s still trying, and sometimes it works. Two years ago, Dennett’s proposals got me experimenting with formats for disagreeing. Two years ago, I talked two other atheists into joining me online for a video conference where I would debate one of them and the other would moderate. The topic was “how useful is it for us atheists to challenge the religious beliefs of others?” I just reviewed the video, and it holds up surprisingly well. Take a listen if you like. There’s video, but it hardly matters. The action is all in the audio. 

View on Youtube

It’s an amateur performance and recording, for sure. At one point there’s a technical glitch, but soon enough everyone is back in the conversation. None of us are familiar with the format we’re trying, not the Google Hangout nor the moderated discussion. No one’s timing anything, so sometimes our answers go on too long. The performance is uneven. But given all that, it’s an interesting record of our experiment because the conversation is different from a regular debate. We…

• figure out what we agree on, which is as important as what we disagree on.
• take absolute either/or questions and turn them into questions of proportion. 
• state each others’ views fairly.
• clarify where our differences of opinion really lie.
• address each other’s points directly. 

This video is not ready for prime time, but as food for thought it seem worth sharing. 

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* “straw man” and “steel man”: These terms are needlessly gendered. Any chance that introducing “steel manning” is also a chance to change both terms at once? How about “straw dog” and “steel dog”? This switch works for me because men are dogs, but dogs are not men.