Today I’ve got a brilliant conversation with Spencer from Play Monkey games. In it, we explore the nuance of designing games for children and he shares some of the amazing insights he’s learned whilst developing his games. You can find Spencer on Instagram; make sure to give him a follow.
Joe: Hey Spencer, thanks for the conversation. Can you start by introducing yourself, who are you and why you make games?
Spencer: I’m Spencer, I live in London with my wife and two kids, and I harbour a passionate and life-long interest in games. Like a lot of game designers, I first started making tabletop games as a natural evolution from playing them. After many years it has now become my main creative outlet and definitely more than just a hobby!
Spencer at the UK Games Expo 2024 Preview Event
My day job as a risk manager can be quite analytical and numbers-focused, which definitely has overlap with the statistical side of game design, but the thing I really love about making games is trying to find that elusive and intangible thing that elevates gameplay from something that just works mechanically to something that is actually fun to do. It really is hugely challenging to get right, and I find that challenge weirdly addictive – so I suppose in a nutshell that is why I make games.
It really is hugely challenging to get right, and I find that challenge weirdly addictive
Joe: Yeah, that challenge and iterative process is addictive – I wonder what makes it so? Perhaps it’s something to do with it being a full controllable space that you’re creating. In a game, you are world building, and every mechanic and rule is your own, maybe that has something to do with the addiction.
Spencer: You mentioned iteration, and I think that really is key to refining any form of creative expression into something polished and professional that will translate well to a wide audience. When I iterate my game designs, it is important for me to get prompt feedback on what works and what doesn’t, so I can seize the creative moment and mindset that I am in rather than having to come back to it cold weeks or months later and then try to remember what on earth it was that I was trying to achieve with a specific mechanic or rule. My wife isn’t a gamer (something I’ve had to come to terms with…) and so historically I’ve had to playtest my designs outside of the house, with friends or at expos and events, which naturally happens less frequently than I’d like.
When our son was born, little did he know it at the time but he would eventually become my playtester-in-chief and has massively helped speed up my iterative process. Fortunately for me he is a chip off the old block and is obsessed with games – everything from closely following the Premier League football table, enjoying Nintendo first party titles, learning the Pokemon TCG, and playing a wide variety of tabletop games including several Kinderspiel des Jahres winners – he’s never anything but excited about learning and playtesting my games, and as a bonus I only have to pay him in muesli bars and ice cream.
Seeing as you mentioned having full control over the space that you are creating as a designer, I would add that playtesting with kids will certainly stretch any notion of player control you thought you might have had!
Joe: That brings us nicely to what I’d love to discuss with you – I noticed on your prelaunch page for Muster: Raise the Banners that you describe the game as for age 8+, but are including a “complimentary streamlined ruleset (age 5+)” – can you tell me a little bit about what that is?
Spencer: Well first and foremost I don’t want to confuse anyone, Muster: Raise the Banners is for ages 8+ and I expect the vast majority of players will want to play with the full standard rule set. However, the background is that I initially designed the game with my son in mind – who was 4 ½ at the time – and the first cut of the game rules was a fully functional, and quite fun, game which we really enjoyed playing together.
As I knew I had a solid core to the game that was striking a chord, I simply built out additional complexity from there by adding (rather than changing) rules, but because of this game design choice I was able to retain the original rule set inside the overall rules and then just subtly mark the additional rules to ignore for younger players or for introductory purposes.
Muster: Raise the Banners – pre-production components
However, it was not just complexity that I was trying to shield younger players from, as if you look at some of the rules that are excluded they either create (i) subtle restrictions (such as only being able to increase card strength by up to 1 at a time) which I know from experience will not be popular with younger kids who prefer a high degree of gameplay flexibility, or (ii) negative actions (such as stealing the other player’s powerful Rainbow Wizard cards) which again is not going to be taken particularly well when playing against your 5 year old niece for instance!
I’ve had some people question why I would bother including these streamlined rules at all when the gameplay is so lightweight and easy to learn anyway, but as a father with board gaming kids in this age range, I feel I am quite well-placed to understand the subtleties of what will be grasped by kids of different ages, and I wouldn’t want to deliberately exclude families with young kids like mine – which would run completely against the ethos of Play Monkey Games [my self-publishing company]: ‘for primates big and small’. I’d add that I had some fantastic playtesters including families with kids both above and below the 8+ age range, and one of the playtesting questions I often ask is about age appropriateness, so I gathered a lot of data to back this up. Lastly, as younger players age, adults can feather-in the additional rules until kids are playing the ‘full fat’ version so to speak, so that is quite nice too.
Joe: That’s a really well thought out method for production. I like the idea of having that solid core, that fundamentally works, which you then build on. It’s interesting that you’ve found particular aspects that younger players either like (high scores/power), and don’t like (stealing). I find that my two are terrible at lying.
Spencer: I’m curious now – have you ever playtested your game designs with kids and how did that go?
Joe: My two are 6 and 8, and my game started with more complexity that I think either of them would be able to manage. It’s also a long game (about 90 minutes); I don’t think I could keep them focussed for more than about 5 minutes (although the little planes in my game are cute).
I am currently working on a Christmas-themed social deduction game, called Sacked by Santa. The aim is to create something that you can play around the dinner table at Christmas, I’m aiming for age 5+. That way the whole family can play.
I wonder, as this will be the first time I’ve playtested with this age, are there any key things I need to have in mind when I start the testing process? Particularly as it’s a game that involves lying!
Spencer: Oh that sounds like a great idea, you know there was a big article by Matt Thrower in SENET magazine (Issue #13 Winter 2023) about Christmas-themed games that you may want to check out. Some fascinating history there…
On the playtesting with kids topic, there are a few things to consider but I think most of these will come naturally to any parent so you’re already off to a good start. Firstly, kids will almost NEVER read written rules, so your gameplay has to be easy to verbally explain (think: ELI5) and highly intuitive in order to minimise fringe cases where you or I would otherwise refer to the rulebook.
kids will almost NEVER read written rules, so your gameplay has to be easy to verbally explain
Secondly, and this is especially the case with young kids, they will very likely want to change the rules as they play – which can be a bit difficult to accept at first as a game designer who is simply trying to arrive at a set of immutable commandments for all players to abide by without exception! However, I wouldn’t let this dissuade you as long as the kids are having fun; unless of course you find that multiple groups of kids across multiple playtests tend to default to the same off-piste gameplay in which case you may need to change your rules to encourage more intuitive behaviour.
Thirdly, you need to put a lot more thought into prototype components – they have to be visually appealing to engage kids to actually want to play the game for duration and across multiple plays, but also need to be designed with kids’ limitations in mind.
A young family enjoying a demo of Creature Crunch at UK Games Expo 2024
A couple of examples of these factors at play – my game Creature Crunch has 12 dice which all need to be rolled at the start of the game. I started out with 22mm jumbo dice as I thought kids would love to see the big symbols and hold these in their little hands… but I quickly found that it was impossible for smaller kids to roll more than a few dice at a time – so I changed the die to a more standard 16mm size and also re-designed the game box so that it can be used to shake up all the dice at once and it solved the problem. The consequence of that decision is that I’ve had to change the age range from 3+ to 4+ given the smaller components, but on the plus side it has brought down production costs and weight slightly too.
On Muster: Raise the Banners, one thing that I didn’t anticipate that kids loved was studying all the little details on the prototype illustrations – and so when I was giving art direction to the game’s illustrator (the talented Pedro R.M. Andreo) for the game board, I asked him to try a ‘Where’s Wally/Waldo’ approach of adding small details and easter eggs in the illustration and it turned out great! I’m even considering adding a checkbox list with the game so that kids can tick off hidden details as they find them.
Joe: That’s some incredibly useful insight there – and I’ll be sure to check out Senet too! In my day job, I spend a lot of time working with young children, and I know that at any age there are massive differences in development between children. I wonder how you factor that in when playtesting and designing for younger audiences?
Spencer: Well now that’s a good point but indeed a very tricky question to answer – I’ll try to offer a couple perspectives on this.
Firstly, thinking as a parent rather than a game designer, you will tend to know what the abilities, interests, and strengths of your kids are better than anybody else. You can then use the age guide on a game as a starting point rather than a definitive answer as to whether a game will be a good fit for a particular kid. For example, perhaps your 6 year old enjoys some games guided for ages 8+ such as King of Tokyo (which my son – now 6 – happened to pull off the shelf at a board game cafe today) and is fine with basic mathematical mechanics like accounting for damage in the Pokemon TCG (rated 8+ by the BGG Community), but may not be as comfortable with the mental multiplication that you might see in Kingdomino (also rated 8+) for instance.
Then if you look at something like Marvel United, it is absurdly rated 14+ despite the chibi-style art on the box clearly appealing to young kids, and the co-op nature meaning that it’s perfect for parents to play with Marvel fans of all ages (NB: I understand 14+ age ratings exempt a board game from being classed as a toy from a legal perspective, hence why some publishers like to use them). Recommended age ratings on family-friendly games should only serve as a rough guide for equivalent levels of complexity; a judgement call really needs to be made about the specific audience as well – let’s not forget the abilities and preferences of adults can also significantly differ!
First Orchard by HABA Games for ages 2+
Secondly, as a game designer, I think it’s helpful to benchmark against other games that you have played when setting an age rating so that adults buying games for their families can make these informed decisions. I’d imagine both of our families have above-average exposure to board games and so are probably not the best measure for the wider market. I once pitched a young kids game to LOKI (the off-shoot of French publisher IELLO targeting younger players) and they had an interesting insight about the typical number of gameplay choices available to players having a determining factor on the suggested age range. For this, I like to use the HABA game First Orchard as a lower-bound, given it is rated for ages 2+. In this game there are barely any choices – players simply roll a single jumbo dice on their turn and then pick the matching fruit off the tree tiles and place it in a communal basket, with the exception of rolling the single wild card face where you can choose which fruit you pick (the optimal play being to choose the tree with the most fruit remaining given the rolls are otherwise evenly distributed). The game has so few choices that only 1 in 6 turns on average will players actually need to make a decision, hence the super low minimum age. Nevertheless, it’s a great ‘gateway’ game to get toddlers learning how to follow rules and hopefully hooked on cardboard for life.
Joe: Such great advice there – there’s so many children’s games on my shelves, but I hadn’t thought to start looking at what was already there!
Let’s round this out, do you think that as your family ages, the games you design will reflect that in terms of complexity? OR do you think you’ll enjoy designing games that fit this niche no matter what the age of your children?
Spencer: You want me to think about my kids growing up and ageing out of my game designs? Now you’re really tugging on the heartstrings!
Well my very first board game design (pre-kids) was an over-complex financial/economic theme game called Leverage (with the scintillating subtitle: a game of corporate takeovers and financial brinksmanship), so in that sense I’ve already gone from one end of the spectrum to the other with now primarily designing games for young families. Likewise one of my early board game loves was Dan Verssen’s Thunderbolt Apache Leader, a fairly complex modern military-themed title and worlds apart from Muster: Raise the Banners which, despite having some characters holding medieval weaponry in the illustrations, deliberately features no actual conflict or violence.
To answer the question, I think it’s quite hard to predict where my game design passions will take me in years to come, but for now I’m perfectly happy operating under the direction of my 6 year old playtester-in-chief! Which reminds me, I need to stock up on ice cream…
Great chatting with you Joe!
Thanks again to Spencer for his time and insight; you can find him on Instagram so do give him a follow. Also make sure you check out his website and see what other wondrous games he’s been working on!
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