But he he seemed to get competitive about drawing or building with Lego and other activities. At the last Unschoolers Support Group another parent pointed out that younger kids may need the finite, black and white resolution. That makes sense, but I wondered if there was anything different. I was, for most of my life, hypercompetitive, and I do hope that he doesn’t follow that path. Not being judged and compared to others based on grades for years on end should help, but I needed to find something that expanded the horizons and started searching online. I thought I could find a game whose object wasn’t to win, but to my pleasant surprise, I discovered a game genre called Co-Operative games, where the goal is to work together. This was better than I could have imagined.

I do want to make it clear that I’m not focusing on Not Winning but trying to avoid a Fixation On Winning. I don’t agree with sports leagues for little kids where everyone gets a trophy and a pat on the back (let’s ignore the fact that I don’t agree with sports leagues for little kids in general ). All they’re doing is planting the messages that winning is much better than losing, winners get this and that and you don’t want to be a loser because losers get jack. There are plenty of activities in life where there are perceived winners and losers, and children should learn to win and lose graciously. But there are plenty of activities that don’t result in winning or losing and children should experience that too. So last week I ordered 3 co-operative games and that 2 that we’ve played so far have been a lot of fun.

The first game we played was The Secret Door. It’s aimed at 5-8 year olds and is a clever twist on the classic game of Memory. 3 Valuable objects have been stolen in a mansion and are hidden behind a secret door, and players are a group of detectives who have to figure out what’s missing in 12 hours or the thieves will get away. The game comes with a board and 36 game pieces – 12 cards of clocks and 24 cards of valuable objects (12 pairs). All the valuable cards are put face down and 3 are selected to be put behind the secret door. The clock cards are then also put face down, mixed with the remaining valuable cards (keeping everything face down) and distributed onto the board. Each person is allowed to turn over 2 cards per turn, just like Memory. When a clock card is found, it’s placed in a row of clocks on the board and one hour is ‘lost.’ Aside from that, it plays just like Memory, except we’re encouraged to help each other.

The game can end at anytime, when you have enough information to guess which 3 valuables are behind the secret door. Only one group guess is allowed, and everyone helps to deduce what they haven’t seen on the board. M wanted to play this game first because he found the prospect of The Secret Door to be really exciting, and he enjoyed the game quite a bit. Both times we’ve played we had to guess after 12 hour cards had been found, and trying to figure out what we hadn’t seen was something new for M to try. He caught on pretty fast, and his reasoning was pretty good for a first-timer. We worked together to make a deduction based on the matched pairs we had found and any cards remaining on the board that we hadn’t seen. By the second game, he caught on that we should try to look at as many cards as possible while trying to get matches.

Since ‘The Secret Door’ takes about 15 minutes to play, we were both ready to play some more when the game was complete. M still tends to point out how many pairs he got, or that he should get to keep the cards because he guessed right, but I’m happy knowing that he’s getting exposed to a different kind of game and working on more cooperation. So far, we’re both having fun and looking forward to game with Trish too.

I’ll post reviews of the other two games we got (Max and Harvest Time) in the next few weeks, as well as one for older kids that we played while in Costa Rica called Scotland Yard. In the meantime, if you’re bored of the game selection in the usual toy and department stores, check out boardgamegeek.com which has a very comprehensive database of games with LOTS of reviews. I found the site to be extremely helpful and informative – and I see LOTS of adult/older kid games that I’d like to give a go.