In anticipation of Gen Con, A Family that Plays Together ...

A Family That Games Together ……

August is GenCon, the largest tabletop gaming convention in North America!!  I have had a deep love of tabletop games since I was a young child, and as an adult, I love them more than ever.  Part of the reason is that games are designed much better than when we were kids.  If you think of Monopoly, Life, and Risk as “classic” board games, and assume that games that are available now are similar, you have a lot of gaming to do!  Games designed in the last 20 years blow most of our childhood memories out of the water, so I encourage you to use this month as an excuse to try out some of the games I will mention later in next week’s article.  The other reason I love games is because they do bring a family together. They provide inexpensive, reliable entertainment that does not depend on electronics, screens, or a wifi connection, but rather, eye contact, critical thinking, creativity, and human interaction.  With our two sons, we frequently have a board game night, and even if they claim they would rather be doing something else, it is pretty obvious once we get into the game that they are having a great time.   

If you are a family enrolled in Fisher Pediatrics, we are challenging you to send us a picture of your family playing your favorite tabletop game this month, and a note on why you love it.  With your permission, we will post your picture on our social media, and every family that does will be entered into a raffle to win board games from our office as a prize!

Tips for family gaming:

Time - if your family is new to board gaming, start with a simple, short, and accessible game.  Most families do best when the game is around an hour long (or less) especially with younger kids.  A perfect example to ease yourself in is Carcassonne.  Carcassonne is a tile placement game that is simple, creative, but with moderate strategy.  Games are usually easily under 1 hour and grade school to adults will be able to enjoy the game.  Also, no reading is involved, which is great for families with a wide range of children.

Rules - If a rule doesn’t sit well with your family, then change it.  The most important thing is to stay consistent, but if you have an idea that would make the game less competitive, shorter, more fun, etc, feel free to set up “house rules.”  I see the rules as general guidelines, but you know what they say about rules, they are made to be …

Know Your Family’s Strengths and Weaknesses - Do you have a child that struggles with losing or is too competitive?  Games are a great way to learn to deal with winning and losing, but sometimes if the family needs a break from that, try a cooperative game.  In cooperative games, the Family is playing against the game.  My favorite is Forbidden Island and the Pandemic Series.  Both games have the players working together to stop a disaster from happening, and only with creativity and significant planning and cooperation can you beat the game.  These are very stressful, but in a super fun way.  Do you have a child with ADHD?  Consider a game where everyone takes their turn at the same time!  My favorite of these (and they are rare) is Planet Unknown.  In this game, tiles are on a lazy susan that turns between players, and each turn every player places a tile they choose.  As a bonus, this game will let you set the level of difficulty for each player, even though they are competing against each other.

Don’t Let Your Kids Always Win - Kids are struggling with the reality that the real world focuses on results, and some of that struggle may be because while being young children, they are rewarded for participating, but not always by the result of their efforts.  In the office, I hear parents telling their kids all the time, “You did a great job” when in fact, they did not.  Games provide a low stakes, real example of competition that let's kids learn how to win and lose gracefully, and they should experience both.  I ask my patients to tell me what is the point of doing something they always win at.  They don’t have an answer.  The reason they don’t have an answer is because there isn’t one.  We learn way more by losing than winning, and kids need to be taught that losing is an opportunity to learn and reevaluate our choices.  I am not saying you should be out to crush your kid the next time you play chess, but you should definitely win occasionally!

The Rule Book is the Biggest Barrier to Playing - Sometimes the rule books are simply overwhelming.  Most gamers have a few games that will never be played because the instructions were just too confusing.  I suggest looking for an instructional video on YouTube prior to reading the rules.  This can be immensely helpful, and one of the best series is Watch it Played! Watch It Played - YouTube   They do a great job of breaking down a game in about 20 minutes and after watching the video, the rules are much easier to read.  I also suggest 2 adults play a new game together first before introducing it to family board game night.  Fumbling around with rules, and looking up how to play will cause your tween to start daydreaming of interacting with their phone, and at that point the night can fall apart pretty quick.  

Types of games and some of Dr. Fisher’s favorite examples!

Deck Builders - This is one of my favorite genres.  In a deck builder all players start with the same (usually) 10 cards in their hand, but as the game goes on they choose cards to add to their deck to make them hand stronger, and ultimately win the game.  Some of these games can be very inexpensive and quick to set up and play, and are great for entertaining yourself at a restaurant.  Star Realms is very accessible and if you enjoy it, has a ton of expansions.  Recently we started playing Summer Camp, which was a birthday present, and that has been a blast.  It is also one of our raffle prizes, so one of you will be playing it this fall! Clank! is a series of games that combine a deck builder and a board game, with adventurers going through a dragon’s lair, trying to steal treasure, while trying not to “clank” too much and wake up the dragon.  These games are a little tedious to set up, but an absolute blast to play and of the games mentioned here, the most fun if you have the time for a little longer game.

Tile Placement Games - This is Mrs. Fisher’s favorite category.  Carcassonne was mentioned earlier, and it is whimsical, requires no reading, and is a beautiful game where players take turns adding square tiles to a board that forms rivers, castles, farms, and churches.  Players place wooden workers (meebles) on their creations to score points at the end.  A much more complicated tile placement game is Planet Unknown, but it is amazing and still easy to learn to play compared to many modern games, and if you can find it, is one of my favorites.

Card Games - This is probably the most familiar category; we all know tons of card games.  I particularly like Uno for young kids, because it teaches strategy, colors, numbers and is equally fun for the adults (unlike most young kid games, that can be tedious for older kids/adults).  As they get a little older, Exploding Kittens can hold a group of 8-12 year old’s attention for hours, if not all night.  For the age that loves a good fart joke, Exploding Kittens itches that scratch, but with plenty of strategy and critical thinking included.  As the kids get older, Euchre, Spades, and Hearts can be great on the go standard deck card games, and a blast for their parents as well. Finally, my favorite card game as an adult has been Biblios, an incredibly simple game where you draft cards to make your hand that give you the ability to later bet on cards that will turn 5 standard six sided dices up or down, and the person that is able to “win” the most dice points wins the game.  The game combines strategy with betting and some very complex decision making, all while having only a few rules.  The combination of simple rules but very deep strategy makes this game a classic.

Trading Card Games - These games are incredibly addictive and offer kids the chance to play with other kids at local game stores.   This is great if you don’t have a bunch of siblings, or your child already struggles with interacting with other kids, and they need a social outlet to practice their interpersonal skills.  These games also teach a lot of math, but without the kids noticing.  Most young kids start with Pokemon, but for those of you who are Disney families, Lorcana is another option.  My favorite game of all time is Magic the Gathering, which is a teen/adult trading card game. My wife once called it my “therapy” and in some ways it is, along with exercise.  The learning curve is steep, but if your teen has some questions about the game, I would be thrilled to help out. 

Cooperative Games - The classics here are the Forbidden Island series and the Pandemic series.  These games have the players take on different “jobs” while they work together to beat the game from impending doom, like your island sinking while you are on it, or a virus spreading through the globe killing everyone (Playing Pandemic during the Covid outbreak felt a little creepy, but the game was invented years before covid). These games are very hard, very challenging, and really feel like a team effort.  If you have never played a cooperative game, but like gaming, you owe it to yourself to give this a try!

Legacy Games - These games change every time you play, physically altering the cards/map/components of the game based on the decisions that you make.  Think of this as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” board game.  They usually take place over 12-15 game nights, and have exciting plot twists and conclusions.  Some of them leave you with a game that you can still play at the end of the experience, some of them do not.  This leads some people to ask, is spending 70 dollars on a game I can only play for 12-15 hours worth it?  Dollar for dollar, it still supplies way more entertainment than the 70+ dollars it cost to take my family to a 2 hour movie, so at least for the Fishers, I say yes.  Our most recent was debuted at Gen Con last year, Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West.  This game has you building train routes across America, just like in regular Ticket to Ride (amazing series and easy to learn, highly recommend them), but the map grows with puzzle pieces between games, and routes are added as the game grows.  The ending was not as exciting as the Pandemic Legacy games, but was still very satisfying.  

I am realizing this article could go on forever, so here I will stop!  Please consider some of these tips and suggestions and start sending us your families game night pics and anything you want to tell our readers, and we will post them on facebook and the website, and enter you in the raffle.  Hopefully this will start a tradition your family will remember for years to come!

As always, good luck parenting, 

Dr. William J. Fisher, MD

Fisher Pediatrics