[100 New Ways to Play Classic Games] Alternative Candy Land Rules #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5

As a parent of younger children, my twin daughters History and Mystery are 7 years old, I get to play a lot of games that consistently receive low ratings at Board Game Geek. This is not due to a lack of board game diversity in the household, rather to the kinds of games that tend to be designed for younger players and the opinions that "sophisticated" hobby game experts tend to have regarding the kinds of games targeted at children. Briefly stated, there is a strong bias against "kids' games."

The bias doesn't stem from a lack of interest in the topics or settings used to inspire kids games, rather the bias seems to be a bias against "primitive" game play. Many children's games are simplified "track games" where the objective of play is to get from the start square to the finish square and in doing so win the game. A quick visit to the Candy Land webpage shows us that the average BGG rating for the game is 3.19 which equates with the game being "Bad." The highest rating, a 6.944 is held by the fantastic game Loopin' Louie, and a 7 on BGG is supposed to be a "Good" game. Good, not excellent.

Source -- Board Game Geek Candy Land Page

Game ratings are subjective though and BGG's guidelines don't provide different scales or criteria for children's games and hobby games. This is a defensible position, but is less helpful to consumers who might wonder whether a game would be fun to "play with kids" instead of wondering if the game would be "fun all the time and forever challenging." I think that Candy Land scores very high on the first criteria, but falls flat on the second.  

Candy Land is a great first game. It's an even better tool for learning about game design. I personally rate the game as an 8 on BGG and think that those who rate it lower are not rating it as what it is. I've defended the game in an earlier post, but I've been intending to write a series of posts on "100 New Ways to Play Classic Games" for quite some time. There was a time when I wanted to write them down and run a Kickstarter to fund a book that collected them. Now I just want to share them as they come.

The idea was inspired by The Boardgame Remix Kit by Kevan Davis, Alex Fleetood, Holly Gramazio, and James Wallis as well as the classic New Rules for Classic Games by R. Wayne Schmittberger. Where both of those products included a couple of variants for a variety of games, I wanted to write a much larger number of variants for the games that I love. This would start with the quintessential Game Designer's toolkit that is Candy Land and move on to other games. Each game will be provided with as close to 100 alternate rules as I can think of and the alternate rules will be spread over a long series of posts instead of smashed into one post. All of the posts will be categorized under the [100 New Ways to Play Classic Games] label. 

Today's post will include 5 Alternative Candy Land rules for your use. Two of them have been previously published, but three are new.

Alternative Candy Land Rules

1) Bag Draw
In this version of "Candy Land," all of the cards are placed into a bag, or hat, and the players draw a random card from the bag on their turn, plays the card, and then places it in the discard pile. This makes the game more purely random, and eliminates the pre-determination factor of the game.

2) Bag Draw Variant

As published, Candy Land features a "broken Markov Chain" because possible future actions, and not merely results, are affected by prior draws. The cards in the discard pile are removed as possible outcomes. This variant of the Bag Draw rule eliminates that feature by returning cards to the deck and resetting the probability that any given card will be drawn in the future. 

In this variant, cards are immediately put back into the bag after it has been used for movement determination and the next player has the possibility of drawing that card from the bag.

3) 1 through 4 and Left or Right

In this variant, players shuffle the cards as normal at the beginning of the game thus setting the order of cards for the remainder of the game.  The first player draws as normal and is considered Player 1 for the remainder of the game.  The other players in counter-clockwise rotation are players 2 through 4. 

 After the first player's draw, all future draws are decided through the roll of a six-sided die.  On a result of 1 to 4, the player of that number draws the next card.  On a result of 5, the player to the left of the current player draws a card.  On a result of 6, the player to the right of the current player draws a card. 


4) Predestiny with Agency

Long time players of Candy Land quickly come to discover that the actual outcome of the game is decided before the first card is flipped. The order of the cards dictates the outcome. The game is a case study of predestination. This rule shakes that up a bit by adding a limited amount of player agency into the picture.

Once the cards have been shuffled, and the first player determined, draw the first ten cards and lay them adjacent to the top of the Candy Land board in the order they are drawn. These are the first 10 actions that will occur in the game. Each player is given ONE (1) opportunity to SKIP per 10 card draw. Only one player may skip any given card. To illustrate:

1) The First Player, in a two player game, would normally be required to move, but sees that the current card is Purple and the second card is a special that would move her significantly up the map, the First Player skips her turn forcing the Second Player to use that card.
2) The Second Player has one SKIP available for this draw, but since a player has already skipped this card the Second Player must use the card, but will get an opportunity later to SKIP a different card.

Once all 10 cards have been played, a new set of 10 cards are revealed and each player can now SKIP one of these cards. SKIPs cannot be carried over from one deal to the next.

5) Revealed Destiny with Agency

This variant continues our exploration of predestination by adding a limited amount of player agency in a slightly different way than the last alternate rule.

Once the cards have been shuffled, and the first player determined, draw all of the cards and lay them adjacent to the Candy Land board in the order they are drawn. The players can now see the entire map of actions that will occur in the game, and the order in which they will happen. Each player is given FOUR (4) opportunities to SKIP an action, but can regain one by accepting a special card that sends them backward. Only one player may skip any given card. To illustrate:

1) The First Player, in a two player game, would normally be required to move, but sees that the current card is Purple and the second card is a special that would move her significantly up the map, the First Player skips her turn forcing the Second Player to use that card.
2) The Second Player has one SKIP available for this draw, but since a player has already skipped this card the Second Player must use the card, but will get an opportunity later to SKIP a different card.

Once all 64 cards have been played, a new set of 64 cards are revealed and each player can now SKIP one of these cards with a refreshed FOUR (4) opportunities. SKIPs cannot be carried over from one deal to the next.

PRIOR POSTS ON CANDY LAND:

• You Can Read My Defense of Candy Land Here.
• You Can Read My Post on Candy Land as RPG Here.

Role Playing Games and Candyland

I've had many conversations with friends where I have posited that the best introductory role playing games for younger players -- ages 5 to 9 -- are The Pokemon Jr. Adventure Game by Bill Slavicsek and Stan!, A Faery's Tale by Patrick Sweeney, Sandy Antunes, Christina Stiles, Colin Chapman, and Robin D. Laws, and RPG Kids by Enrique Bertran aka NewbieDM.  Each of these games comes at introducing RPGs to younger players and their parents from a different perspective, and each is a wonderful addition to any gamer's collection.  These games aren't merely good introductory games, they are also fun games for gamers of any age.

Over the past year, I have added another game to this list and the game might surprise some hobby gamers.  The game is the much maligned Candy Land by Hasbro.  Most hobby gamers look at Candy Land as a boring exercise in which the players have no influence over the flow of play, and as a game completely devoid of any kind of play strategy.  Anyone who has played the game knows that the only actions a player takes are to draw a card and to move his/her pawn to the space signified by the drawn card.  This simple randomized movement "track" game is so disliked that it has a rating of 3.21 on BoardGame Geek.  A quick look at what a 3.2 rating means on BGG, let's us know that the BGG community thinks the game is Bad and not worth replaying.  Even adjusting for BGG's anti-children's game bias by adding a point or so doesn't put this game into recommendable territory for most gamers.

Last December I defended Candy Land as a board game, and a quick look through the internet demonstates that the game is a rich source for statistical analysis.  Dave Rusin of Northern Illinois University and Lou Scheffer a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (which I first heard about in Tim Hartford's book Adapt) have both written good analyses of the game from a statistical perspective, but it is the rigorous analysis at DataGenetics by Nick Berry which truly demonstrates just how deeply one can dig into the statistics of the game. When I defended the game back in December, I highlighted the pedagogical aspects of play in Candy Land.  It is a wonderful game for teaching young people how to play games, and also aids in educating young players that not all victories come from "being better" than your opponent which helps to teach good sportsmanship.

What I only briefly mentioned in that post, was that Candy Land is a great role playing game as well.  Back in December I stated that one of the joys of playing the game with my daughter's History and Mystery was that it engaged their imagination's in storytelling.  I'm quite surprised that I didn't associate this with role playing and role playing games in that article, even though I described the way my daughters play the game as follows:

Rather than the goal of the game being to "go home" as is written in the rules, Mystery and History are on a journey to have tea at Hello Kitty's house.  To add to the immersion, they have placed Lego Duplo "cat legos" on the board at both the home and peanut brittle house squares.  The home square represents Hello Kitty's house and the peanut brittle house is the domicile of Hello Kitty's apocryphal twin sister "Boxie." 

Re-reading the post made me realize how much like a role playing game session that sounds, but my daughters go even further than might be alluded to in the above description.  History and Mystery also engage in dialogue with the Duplo cats and have conversations with Hello Kitty and Boxie when they reach their destinations.  In fact, it is more important to Mystery that her "Ginger Man" reach the Peanut Brittle square than winning the game.  What's more is that they use the first person singular "I" when they refer to their gingerbread man pawn.  The girls are completely immersed in the fictional world of Candy Land.  Not only that, but they have expanded the fantasy world to include their own imaginary components.

As a parent it is a real joy to watch my daughters engage in this kind of imaginative play.  They also role play when they dress up in their Iron Man and Captain America costumes, when they play with their Legos and cars as well as with various stuffed animals and dolls.  They even do some role playing when they borrow my D&D and Star Wars miniatures.  It's quite magnificent to watch, and it's truly amazing to see how well Candy Land creates a Salen/Zimmerman/Huizinga "magic circle" as well.  It demonstrates it so well that like Zimmerman in his defense of the magic circle, I find criticisms like that by Darryl Woodford a little pendantic, overly literal, and odd.  What is most interesting in this demonstration is that I get to see how the "magic circle" of play that my daughters have created during a game of Candy Land extend beyond the spaces on the board itself, but that the imaginary land in which they are playing includes implied spaces in the illustrations and their own imagined Candy Land environment.  This imagining only extends until they stop playing the game.  Once the game stops, they are no longer in Candy Land and they have already had their tea parties.  They are ready to begin engaging with the real world and their foray's into "Elfland" (to borrow a phrase from Lord Dunsany) are finished and without the trauma or life changes that accompany most fictional representations of fantastic journeys.  The magic circle allows them to explore Wonderland without the risk of the Red Queen chopping off their heads.  It's a wonder to see.

I wish that I was the first person to describe Candy Land as a role playing game, but James Ernest in Family Games: The 100 Best -- and I'm sure countless others -- have beat me to it. As he described his play with his daughter Nora:

When I got "stuck on a gooey gumdrop," Nora would move her pawn back to that space and help me get unstuck.  This completely surprised me, because as a grown-up I assumed that a race game is unfriendly.  She would move back to her own space after helping me, but she always helped.  And she expected this kind of socially responsible behavior out of her parents as well....

Anyone who thinks he has seen all of Candy Land ought to play it again with a child.

Candy Land may not be the pinnacle of role playing game systems, but it seems clear to me that my own "maturity as a gamer" is what got in the way of my enjoyment of this game for many years.  Playing it with my daughters is a joy, and I will rue the day when Candy Land no longer creates a magic circle where my daughters are imagining a realistic milieu.  I hope that when that day comes, games like Pokemon Jr., A Faery's Tale, RPG Kids, and even D&D will be able to create one to replace the one that was lost.  There is a part of me that thinks it is a tragedy when adults believe that spending some time wandering the fields of Elfland is a waste of time or silly.