Ben Railton makes the case for why occasionally letting his sons win at board games can actually be more empathetic and educational than leaving the outcomes up to chance.
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Board games have been a significant part of my life since I was very young and, apparently, I’ve passed that love along to my boys. We’ve gone through obsessive stages with Connect Four, Sorry!, The Game of Life, Midnight Party, and roughly 12 different versions of Monopoly (among other favorites), and are now firmly ensconced in an extended love affair with Stratego. This most recent stage has been especially fun for me, as Stratego was one of my own youthful favorites, but it has also presented a unique and telling parenting challenge: how to lose subtly but consistently.
With Monopoly, for example, I have found that it’s quite easy to lose intentionally to my boys without them catching on. For a while they didn’t count the spaces after I rolled, so I could “land on” Boardwalk when my older son had built a hotel there—darn it! Even when they started counting, it’s still quite possible to make trades that seem to benefit both players but end up giving the boys an advantage; to “decide” not to buy certain properties in order to save money, and otherwise to make small moves that leave the game competitive and fun but also result in a win for the little fellas.
No such luck with Stratego, though. Sure, there are ways to throw a game—running your powerful pieces into bombs, putting your flag in lousy locations with little protection—but the boys are much too smart and into the game not to see through those ruses. They want me to play hard and well, and won’t enjoy the game if they feel that I’m not—but they also want to win, not every time but much of the time, to feel that their plans and strategies (into each of which they put extended and serious, and very cute, thought and discussion, banishing me to the upstairs while they do so) have paid off.
I’m sure some people would argue that it’s important for them to learn to lose well, to recognize that things won’t always go their way, to experience such disappointments; would say that by letting them win much of the time, I’m being one of those “everybody gets a trophy” parents, coddling them or spoiling them or the like. But to me, the world is going to throw plenty of losses and disappointments and failures their way, as it indeed already has and as it does for all of us; I don’t believe any part of a parent’s job is to give them more such negatives to contend with. Quite the opposite: one of my main roles is to help them learn confidence and strength, learn that when they put their thought and work and passion into something it can pay off, and learn to have fun with the things that excite and interest them.
For all those reasons, and many others, I’ve made it a priority not only to play games with them every time they want, but to find ways to lose those games a good percentage of the time. But right now, the game of choice is Stratego, and so I’m back to that problem: how do I lose subtly but regularly at this one? That’s what they call one of those good problems, but it’s still one I need to figure out—and your tips will be much appreciated!
Thanks Tim! For everybody, a quick follow up that occurred after I submitted this piece: the boys were playing online Stratego (yup; what isn’t online?!) with a human opponent, and it looked certain that he had them beat. I suggested that they might want to surrender, to avoid having to draw out the experience of him taking their remaining pieces, but they were having none of it. They came up with a last-ditch plan, and gave it a shot–it required him to make a mistake, but he did, and they eked out an incredibly hard-won victory. An entirely real one,… Read more »
Use your “1” (or your best remaining piece) imprudently to clean out their back rows. This will sometimes work well and win the game for you, but often enough you may get surprised by a bomb or spy (especially if you have an idea where the spy might be, go charging in – if questioned, merely say, “fortune favors the bold.”