Hating on Candyland: Why most games for kids are awful • Hacker News Board

Re: Hating on Candyland: Why most games for kids are awful

#61

Post by bengarvey » Mon, Apr 18, 2011, 3:58 PM UTC

midnightmonster wrote: post #52

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, ma…

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

Re: Hating on Candyland: Why most games for kids are awful

#62

Post by hugh3 » Mon, Apr 18, 2011, 7:50 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #39

jberryman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Hating on Candyland: Why most games for kids are awful

#63

Post by jasonwocky » Tue, Apr 19, 2011, 8:26 PM UTC

oskarkv wrote: post #49

raganwald wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

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...