#DadGoals II

The Quickening

My nine year old son has lived up to my wildest dreams when it comes to wargaming but at times that can be a double-edged sword.  We had several hours together last weekend and we played a game he invented using Legos as the tabletop scenery and minifigures as the miniatures.  The game was an adventure party taking on a greater number of enemies with SWAT like building infiltration taking the place of the dungeon crawling.  Not that my son explained it that way but I'm trying to translate from 4th grader to gamespeak.

"I see we're going to need to solve this problem Adam West style"

He had 4 minis versus my big boss and nine minions.  A lot of special forces books have been coming home from the elementary school library lately so his team was special operators trying to rescue a hostage from my villainous gang.  He had constructed the three story building with a playable roof surface as well as a skylight that went from the roof through the third floor down to the second floor.

What's a building scene without a hanging villain wrapped up for the cops in classic Spidey style?

There were also vehicles, his team initially landed on the roof via a rope down from their stealth insertion plane.  The good guys also had an off road truck for their land based assault, that blue number in the pics above and below.  The villains rounded out the accessory count with small ATV used for patrolling the vast grounds around their hideout.

I'd hate to be the Geico adjuster that shows up at the scene of an accident involving pedestrian causalities and gunplay!

In the game design process my son seemed to be including cards that dealt with objectives or story twists, but as we were beta testing his game and the cards weren't completed yet we did not use these.  All the figures seemed to have combat values for attack and defense (a lot of my son's games designs incorporate this mechanic from his first real games system Heroclix) but he hadn't written them down.  I tried to keep track as my patience waned over the two hours we were playing but the values did seem consistent and not like he was just making them up in the moment.

It was hard to keep Jon Snow from pensively staring off into the void, however to be fair three stories is his minimum brooding tower height.

I remember making up games like this all the time when I was his age but there was no one I could find to try them out on other than my younger brother.  Between the 4 year age difference and my lack of understanding of the concept of game balance, it's no surprise that he was not interested in most of my home brew games.  While it's amazing to get to humor my son's exploration of game development it does lead to sometimes playing two hours of a game where every combat resolution makes as much sense as Calvinball.  There were a lot of special rules that seemed to pop up, coincidentally when they worked best to my son's advantage.  I think he was trying to add in things like the stratagems in Kill Team, my "favorite" being his rule that when two of his men moved on to a floor in his same turn they got to attack twice.

Minion year book picture (back row, R to L) - Random goon with shotgun, Chris Pratt in Jurassic World, Punisher, Greedo with a human head, Jon Snow.  (Front row) - Angry mob guy from Steven Seagal's classic Above the Law, Surfer Hydra agent, Solid Snake (I think), Angry Cassian Andor.  How did these guys not win?

Although it was a long affair it was fun to encourage his love of games and see how the elements of the different games he's played so far are mixing together in his head.  We will continue to ride the game train together and see what parts of the hobby appeal to him.

#Dadgoals courtesy of (Jerod)imusPrime at the Battle Mallet Podcast.