So last Saturday I took my sons to a children's Christmas party. I got to choose the gifts they would receive and so I thought it was as good an opportunity as any to get Neil another junior board game adaptation (since getting him Catan Junior for his Birthday). This time it was Monopoly Junior.
The theme is cute and very child centric. It's intended for up to four kids and offers them such avatars as Scottie the dog or baby T-Rex. There are no Community Chest cards or mortgage cards. You do get Chance cards, though and ownership is stated by placing avatar markers on the places you buy. Also the site sets always come in pairs and the site rent is equal to the cost. You also must buy whatever unclaimed site you land on, there is no choice here. There is only one denomination for the in-game paper money and it carries a value of one.
So as you can imagine it's a very simple game, subject to dice rolls and with little strategy to delve in. My focus was more on getting him to go through the sequence of actions constituting a turn and to do so till the game is concluded. In principle the game should have allowed this without a problem. However, and this is perhaps an understatement, I forgot to take into consideration two aspects of of presenting a game to a young audience. The first is the time of day.
It was late afternoon, when under normal circumstances Neil's attention span wanes giving way to pre-sleep restlessness. Anyone with kids will fully understand what I am talking about here. It's that sense of false or pseudo energy that befalls kids just before sleep. It's what leads to to dash around the house for no reason whatsoever other than to burn what energy the might have in them...and reason gives way to a strange world filled with Alice-in-Wonderland rules that would only make sense to the Mad Hatter himself. So let's just say the timing was not right.
The first signal that something was amiss was when my boy stated that he did not need to listen to the rules, simple as they might have been, because he knew them. It turned out that he had played a similar game to the one tabled but with slightly different rules. Regardless, aided by a willing partner in crime, my better half Claire, we got down to playing the first few turns...then all hell broke loose!
You see the moment Neil landed on an unoccupied space which he had to purchase regardless, he began to grow frustrated. When he saw his mother earn some in-game cash because of a chance card, that frustration grew. Then when he saw in-game money change hands (again in favour of Claire) and that he was getting any, he exploded. I'm talking tears here, it was surreal. We tried continuing nonetheless for a few more rounds, or rather until he fell on one of my properties and he had to pay rent, then the tears and the reasons for them just became unmanageable even if I instantly wavered the transaction in the hope of getting him back into the game.
In a post-game analysis, Claire said that it was most likely that Neil played with an initial belief that the in-game paper money was actual real cash. So this might have exacerbated the emotional roller-coaster he went through when he saw the paper tokens move away from his stack. Well, it could be, though I personally am more in favour of the theory that he was just too tired to play and that this gave way to the episode we experienced.
What this taught me is that you should never underestimate the mental state of your child going into a game. If you want to expose them to a new game then it would be best to do so in the morning or early afternoon latest. Also perhaps it would be a good idea to go over the main aspects of the game before actually engaging into active play.
This does not mean we will not try this game again in the future but for now we will set it aside hoping that we will manage to reap a better experience when it is next brought to the table.
Until next time, signing off!
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