The Benefits of Both Board Games and Digital Games

My three-year-old daughter, L, has been playing very simple games on our tablet for a little while. These are not marathon Angry Bird sessions - more like two-minute finger drags with a jigsaw puzzle or a few shakes of Sago Sago's awesome Sound Box. My wife and I are still feeling out the best way to raise a digital native, wary of exposing her to too much screen time despite knowing full well L's life will be inextricably linked to cyberspace and iClouds.

We're not alone in our fear, of course, and software developers know it. Head over to Google Play or Apple's App Store and you'll see hundreds of games for preschoolers, many promising to be educational, brain-stimulating and mind-nurturing, or making some other sort of vague pledge to ensure parents feel like they're sparking their kid's inner prodigy rather than just playing a video game.

The thing about games billed expressly as "educational" is they tend to be kind of a drag (in my opinion). Many of them remind me of flash cards or multiplication tables - drilling in facts through rote memorization rather than anything that actually encourages actual decision-making or, you know, fun.

For a while now, we've been playing offline games with L, such as cards, boards and dice. It's been a great experience for us and, while it's not the immediate goal, it's strengthening her brain power in the process.

Memory was her first game. We either play with all the cards face-up and go for speed, or choose a few of her favourite pairs and put them face-down. Despite being pre-kindergarten, L already has a mind like a steel trap; she has this preternatural total recall inherited from her mother (who memorizes phone numbers after hearing them once) and not her father (who has no idea what he had for lunch).

Watching my daughter's face light up as she matches sneakers, tyrannosaurs or pizza slices is great. Since we've started playing, she's gotten better and better - observing our mismatched choices before making selections. Still, being a little one, she sometimes just wants the two kitty-cat cards and then things end abruptly. I'm sure there are similar matching games we can download, but they're not as tactile. They don't allow us to sit in a circle, cross-legged, swiping cards back and forth.The success of Memory brought us to a toy store, where L selected Snail's Pace Race. It was on sale (always a nice thing) and had bright, wooden pieces in contrast to a lot of the cheap plastic tokens in other games. The rules were simple: roll the colour-coded dice and move the corresponding mollusc, one step at a time, to its leaf. L took to it pretty quickly (though I can't imagine this game being overwhelmingly fun for anyone who isn't three). She learned how to read a die pretty quickly ("It's the colour on the top, but not the ones on the sides because they're not important!"), and improved her methodical grasping abilities.

Once the excitement of pushing snails one space at a time wore thin, my wife embarked on a highly controversial act amongst the gaming crowd - she started making up her own rules. Substituting one of the coloured dice with a normal spotted one, she informed my wide-eyed daughter that we'd now roll to figure out which snail to move, and then again to decide how many spaces to move him (or "her" since technically, they're hermaphroditic). This new element involved L carefully counting the dots before moving her snail the same amount. We had transformed a colour recognition task into a math one.Math also figures into L's very favourite game - War. A few months ago, she found a poker deck and demanded we try it together. My parents approach euchre like it's a blood sport, and my in-laws play canasta in several languages, but I'm a little more limited with my card sharking. Still, I figured War was a good bet because it involved L not only counting, but also working on her comparisons. She didn't just need to count to five, but she also needed to understand that it was bigger than "two."

When we play, I remove all the face cards and aces to simplify things. We sit at the table and I shuffle. I'm not exactly croupier-quality when it comes to deck-mixing, but I'm good enough to impress a preschooler. Her favourite part remains the dealing, and she says each recipient's name as the cards are passed out.

There's no real strategy in "standard War" as the rules are simple: flip over your cards, and the highest one wins. In "preschooler War," it's much more complex. I need to be able to see my next few cards and play ones that will lose without L noticing. Other parents may have no qualms obliterating her two of hearts with a nine of clubs, but I figure when it's a complete game of dumb luck, there's no harm in helping a toddler stand tall. Besides, half the time L forgets about who winds up with the bigger pile and just wants the cards with the threes ("They're the same age as me!").As she gets older, we'll try games that are a little more complex, such as trumps, or board games like Sorry! and Guess Who?, before moving up to more strategic affairs. (I look forward to losing to her in chess.) We'll also keep downloading those one-player apps (aside from still being fun, they serve as great little distractions when I need three minutes to run to the bathroom), but sometimes it's a bit more fun to be sitting around the table together, rolling a "six" to march your purple snail to victory. 

Erik Missio used to live in Toronto, have longish hair and write about rock 'n' roll. He now lives in the suburbs, has no-ish hair and edits technical articles. He and his wife are collaborating on a three-year-old girl who may already be smarter than both of them. He received his MA in Journalism from the University of Western Ontario.