Designing Games with My 5 Year Old Daughter

I’ve written 53 previous blogs on GamestormEDU, and it’s the first one that is still the most important to me. It was about how all of this started – the games, the company, everything – as a promise to my first daughter. She’s now five, and one of my greatest joys has been not just playing games, but also designing games with her. Below are some of the insights I’ve learned designing games with a four year old who just turned five!

Start By Revising a Game They Know

Like many kiddos, my oldest daughter’s first game was Candyland. And, like many kiddos, my daughter fell in love with the look of Candyland but not the gameplay. After realizing she loved the world of the game more than the mechanics of the game, I started asking her about what she would like to do in the world. She said it would be fun to explore the world as a team… and that’s when I realized Candyland was perfect as a Dungeons and Dragons remix. 

As we talked, my daughter and I settled on being able to talk to the candy, eat it, or run from it as mechanics. We turned the various princesses and princes in the game into characters, and tried it out. She loved it – especially rolling dice to determine if she had successfully talked the popsicle into being peaceful, trying to lick an ice cream cone into submission, or running from a licorice vine.

Bring Some Creative and Tactile Inspiration

One of the perks of designing games is that you often have a variety of game components on hand. I have bins full of dice, spinners, dry erase cards, meeples, figurines, and much more from design kits and conventions! I brought these out to my daughter and simply asked her what she found exciting. 

The dice were an immediate hit – she found those so fun to roll. We talked about dice that had fun images on them, and that went into our first original game. She also liked having figurines in the game and a clock-shaped spinner, so in they went!

Identify Themes that Resonate with Kids

Kids are incredibly creative at heart, and research has shown that we slowly lose that creativity as we enter adulthood. So I figured my daughter would have a more creative game idea with the items she picked than I would. When we talked about game ideas, she brought up that fairies would be a fun character to play in a game. Why not?

In the current version of our game, the goal is to collect teeth, flowers, sprinkles, and pacifiers. Each dice has those symbols and along with a pillow icon and kid icon. As players roll the dice, they place the icons in a room and try to have three of a symbol along with a pillow to have a fairy come collect it. The kid icon wipes a collection, and all four types must be collected before the clock strikes 12. 

My five year old has taught me so much about game design. What have you learned from kiddos about creativity?