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Topic: Teaching Arimaa to children (Read 3028 times) |
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qswanger
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Teaching Arimaa to children
« on: Sep 22nd, 2010, 10:16pm » |
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I have a 5-year old daughter who will be 6 in November. This past weekend we went to our favorite bookstore cafe where I taught her the game she sees me playing a lot on the computer -- Arimaa. I am pleased to report that our gaming session (3 quick games in total) was pretty successful ... much better than I had thought it would be. She was very eager to play (especially after hearing my enthusiasm for it) and understood the push and pull concepts very well along with the need to have "a buddy" next to a trap to avoid capture. She also understood the hierarchy of animal sizes, at least in theory. She seemed to delight in and was quite proud to prod one of my wayward animals into a trap, but we still need to work on her paying attention to the ultimate goal of the game -- getting one of the bunnies to the other side. So, I think children her age can be taught Arimaa successfully, even though mine is much more right-brained than left.
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omar
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Re: Teaching Arimaa to children
« Reply #1 on: Sep 24th, 2010, 12:17am » |
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Thanks for sharing this with us Quinn.
One thing you might want to try is adding a dice on your turn. If you roll a 4 or more you get 4 steps, if you roll anything less you only get that many steps. Of course your daughter doesn't need to roll and always gets 4 steps. This helps to equalize the skill level a bit and gives her a chance to win sometimes. Works pretty well with my daughters; they like beating me and don't mind that I'm handicapped by the dice 
Also to speed up the game a bit you might want to try starting with fewer pieces per side. We've found that games with 2 cats and 3 rabbits per side go pretty fast and are still quite interesting.
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Nombril
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Re: Teaching Arimaa to children
« Reply #2 on: Sep 24th, 2010, 4:43pm » |
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I was also pleasantly surprised by how much fun a youngster could have with the game.
In case you are interested, here are some thoughts others posted about teaching kids:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=talk;action=display;nu m=1263437318
I've been playing on and off with my almost 4 year old. I took Omar's reduced step idea, but instead of using a dice we just decide ahead of time if I get 2 or 3 steps. We also skip the freezing rule.
She is very excited when she has stopped one of my rabbits from getting to goal, but she tends to go a bit over board and moves all of her pieces over to that spot. (I guess that tends to happen in soccer/football and basketball as well - everyone gangs up on the ball, right?!)
We've been playing with 4-6 rabbits, and about 5 additional pieces per side.
Last week, some friends were over. My daughter offered to teach the other 3 year old how to play, and the two had fun pushing the pieces around around the board.
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ocmiente
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Re: Teaching Arimaa to children
« Reply #3 on: Sep 28th, 2010, 1:30pm » |
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I have a variation for playing with children, but it requires one adult and two children, ages 7 and 5.
Play is according to standard Arimaa rules, except that the 7 year old plays one side, and the 5 year old and adult play the other side. The 7 year old plays as normal. The 5 year old and adult alternate turns, and no help is given to the 5 year old other than to make sure that a legal move is made.
I suppose that you could play this with any three players, with the second strongest player taking the spot of the 7 year old.
I played this last night with my two kids, and it went pretty well. The 7 year old won.
The biggest problem right now isn't teaching them the rules, but teaching either one of them to be gracious when they don't win.
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omar
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Re: Teaching Arimaa to children
« Reply #4 on: Sep 30th, 2010, 6:29pm » |
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on Sep 28th, 2010, 1:30pm, ocmiente wrote:
I played this last night with my two kids, and it went pretty well. The 7 year old won.
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Wow, your moves must have really handicapped the 5 year old
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