Kid mode

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Hertz Doughnut

I taught my 4-year-old to play Dominion with a forked version of Goko Salvager that was basically a "kid mode" which limited the game as follows:

- Removed the scary cards:
var JackIsASweetInnocentBoy = " /witch /youngwitch /harem /thief /torturer /seahag /alchemy /fortuneteller /cultist /urchin /deathcart /mystic /altar /graverobber /rogue /soothsayer /cutpurse"

- Forced all games to be against Serf Bot

He loved it.  A fun way to teach basic math and logic skills. (Which the world needs more of!)

Keep up the great work!

Kind regards,
HD

Bmoan


Mick


WhiteRabbit1981

Ill sign for "awesome idea". To someone who grew up with Grimms' Fairy Tales it seems odd to cut out the witch, but I would neither want to explain to a 4-year old what a harem is in detail :-)
But, please explain to me:
you taught a 4-year old to read, use, calculate and understand wall-of-text cards like "Tournament", "Market Square" and "Tactician"??  :o

Hertz Doughnut

Yeah, no.  He wasn't (and still isn't) playing with complicated cards.  He's 6 and a half now, and we played with Saboteur for the first time last night.  He didn't understand what it did until I used it on him, and we walked through the text instruction-by-instruction.  Then he thought it was awesome, especially when he hit one of my Provinces.

At age 4 the gist of his playing ability was that he learned how to count up his treasures, learned that you can't buy something for 5 when you only have 4, and memorized a small set of "good cards".  With every kingdom, if he saw a new card he didn't know, he would ask me if it was a good card.  Good cards became things that help buying Golds and Provinces... things like Laboratory, Council Room, Smithy, Bank, Cities, Library, and Goons.  Workshop and Gardens weren't "good cards", but I taught him how they can dominate if they're together.  Grandpa was impressed when Jack beat him for the first time that way.

I'd say that at that age his mind was essentially building a connection between the cards' pictures and their function... not really reading the text.  There's a pretty big difference for a 4-year-old between playing IRL and playing at Making Fun.  MF was a lot more fun for him, because he didn't have to execute the instructions on the card.  He just clicked it and it happened... and he could basically remember how that kind of card would work next time.

He wasn't able to really create/improvise strategy.  But he could remember and execute strategies I told him.  He remembered things like that when playing Library, he should skip action cards when he had 0 actions left.  He wouldn't buy Copper in general, but would if he had played a Goons.  He knew that if he got all the Cities, they "went bananas".

MF was also more fun because the two of us could play cooperatively against Serf Bot.  IRL, he had a real aversion to losing... made him not like the game.  So I got stuck in a catch-22 of sorts... if I played dumb so that he would win and thus continue to like the game, he would mimic my purchases (e.g. 8 thieves).  If I played well, he'd lose and not want to play again.  Co-op vs Serf Bot was the answer.

The first time we did that, Witch was in the kingdom.  I told him that Witch was a "good card" and we crushed it.  We both had a great time and kept playing all the way until bedtime.  However, the next day, the report from Mom was that Jack was running around the house all day saying "I'm a witch! I cursed you!" over and over.  That's where I had the idea to make a chrome extension that removed those cards.  Everybody happy.

Kind regards,
HD

WhiteRabbit1981

Nice Story! It made me smile to imagine Jack running around the house cursing everyone  :D
I think "Goons" is a very scary card! But that is maybe because the german version translates it to "Halsabschneider", and that will translate back into english as "cuts-through-your-throat".

Remembering Pictures and "what it does" instead of the text explains a lot.

Sidenote: the name "Jack" was not introduced yet (exept in JackIsASweetInnocentBoy) when you wrote:
Grandpa was impressed when Jack beat him for the first time
When I read it, i initially understood that a 4-year old beat you by using a double-Jack BM Strategy  :o

Hertz Doughnut

lol!  Yes, if Jack was running around saying "I'm a goons, I'm cutting through your throat" Dad would quickly censor it!  Here in the American Midwest, "goons" is a cartoony-sounding word with a cartoony-looking picture.  Heck, Google's primary definition for the word is "a silly, foolish, or eccentric person"... secondary is "bully or thug".  It perplexes me that DXV chose such a silly name for such a powerful card... maybe I'll start calling it Halsabschneider to give it the respect it deserves.

But the relevant part is this: If Jack went to school and called another kid at school a "goon", I think the teacher would probably just laugh.  However, if he called his teacher a "witch"... we'd be getting a phone call. :)

SkyHard

Quote from: WhiteRabbit1981 on 08 March 2017, 11:38:01 AM
When I read it, i initially understood that a 4-year old beat you by using a double-Jack BM Strategy  :o

As long as he is not using a club to beat his grampa ;-)

Martin plays Piano

Really nice post here ...  :D

Coming back to the ,,goons" and its German card name ,,Halsabschneider": the literal translation might really lead into the word "cutthroat" in the meaning of murderer or assassin.

Normally in Germany the word "Halsabschneider" isn't used like that, it describes more a person who fleeces someone (by taking too much money, by ruining his existence etc.) – another idiom I found could be "to take somebody to the cleaners"(which I never heard before), but what could hit the point.

So "Halsabschneider" aren't nice people at all, but normally they let you alive – so at the end the German edition uses a better description what the card really does rather than only being a "silly goon". By the way the picture on the card fits to the German meaning and doesn't show a killer on the road.

Have fun
Rachmaninoff

FrogOrCat

Charming story!

We taught our son to play Dominion IRL when he was six. We play a lot of online games but strangely not together much anymore (he's more into Steam games and I'm a more traditional board game player that plays them online). He's 10 now and asked yesterday to play with me and I asked whether he'd like to play online (as I was doing at the moment) or at the table. It's been a while so we started with the base game but from the other room he was yelling to me "MOM! This isn't the base set! It has a witch!" Clearly, we didn't play with witches and curses when we first taught him. :)

We just played with the real cards a little while ago as we couldn't set up a game online. We did a mix of base and prosperity and it was hard not to use the Kings Court with the Mountbank more than once. It's nice to have someone to play with.

squirezucco

That was a nice story, but my kids (13, 12, and 10) are all better than I am at Dominion. What I need is a dad-safe version.

Stef, can you work on graying out all the shiny distracting cards that prevent me from building a good deck? For example, Watchtower is such a neat card and I don't care if I need to reach 5 treasures to get a Mountebank and I don't care that silver/silver is a better opening to get 5 because I *like* Watchtower and it's fun and I'm sure it won't interfere with me reaching 5 in turn 3 or 4; plus I'll just trash all the curses and coppers because I will have a Watchtower anyway and it's going to be great and now why is my deck a slog again but my opponent is running a smooth engine?

Anyway, can you work on that?

Jacob Marley

Quote from: squirezucco on 31 March 2017, 08:58:21 PM
That was a nice story, but my kids (13, 12, and 10) are all better than I am at Dominion. What I need is a dad-safe version.

Stef, can you work on graying out all the shiny distracting cards that prevent me from building a good deck? For example, Watchtower is such a neat card and I don't care if I need to reach 5 treasures to get a Mountebank and I don't care that silver/silver is a better opening to get 5 because I *like* Watchtower and it's fun and I'm sure it won't interfere with me reaching 5 in turn 3 or 4; plus I'll just trash all the curses and coppers because I will have a Watchtower anyway and it's going to be great and now why is my deck a slog again but my opponent is running a smooth engine?

Anyway, can you work on that?

But if he has mountebank, you do need that watchtower...

werothegreat

What, exactly, is scary about Fortune Tellers, Mystics and Soothsayers?

Hertz Doughnut

Quote from: werothegreat on 01 April 2017, 06:18:44 AM
What, exactly, is scary about Fortune Tellers, Mystics and Soothsayers?

I don't know how Fortune Tellers get their clairvoyance in your neck of the woods, but here in the American Midwest, they consult demons. ;)

For Mystic and Soothsayer, we also have the artwork.