I taught my 7-year-old to play Scythe and it didn't go how I thought

I figured we'd just do the basic moves and maybe play for 20 minutes. She asked to read the faction abilities herself and picked Polania. By turn three, she had a plan to get her mech onto the factory tile. The game took over two hours and she only lost by three coins. Has anyone else had a kid grasp a complex game way faster than expected?

3 comments

3 Comments

murray.grace2mo ago

Wow, that's awesome. My nephew asked to try chess once and I figured I'd just show him how the pieces move. Kid checkmated me in like ten moves. Felt my whole ego deflate. They just see the board differently, no overthinking. Sounds like your daughter's got that same kind of sharp mind. Makes you wonder who's really teaching who.

charles_coleman2mo ago

Did you at least let her win, or did she just outsmart you fair and square?

jesse_cooper27d ago

Actually I used to think kids that age couldn't handle anything with more than like 10 rules, so I never even tried with my own. Then my niece came over and wanted to play Terraforming Mars (you know, the one with like a million resource tracks) and I was sure it'd be a disaster. She ended up tutoring me on the best card combos by the second generation, even caught me trying to make a shady trade route to boost my heat production. Totally changed how I look at what kids can do when they're actually interested - they don't get paralyzed by the options like we do, they just pick the coolest looking thing and figure it out from there.