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Two player games do have an advantage as you only need two of you. Finding other children to play with is a huge advantage too and lots of schools have chess cl

by jvvw 4y ago

Two player games do have an advantage as you only need two of you. Finding other children to play with is a huge advantage too and lots of schools have chess clubs, so I understand it's popularity. It's hard if you are much better at a game than your children. Magic The Gathering works well because they can genuinely beat us, but you need a keen player as a parent really. There is also the age issue. I think Go is a more interesting game than chess but the scoring is a little hard to teach and it hasn't captured my children's interest as much as chess. Backgammon is interesting - been wondering about teaching it to my children as a counterpoint to chess. Not sure if mine (9 and 11) are quite ready for all the bidding conventions in bridge but working up to it with whist. Poker is very educational I think - I learned lots from playing it - but not really sure whether it would work as a family game.

cesaref 4y ago
Definitely give backgammon a try with them. It's very easy to pick up the basics, I reckon any 9 and 11 year old will pick it up in an hour, if you avoid the doubling die and just play games out. A few evenings of this and before you know it they'll be playing tavla with a lovely turkish tea on the side and will be learning some farsi for common rolls. What's not to like?
- User23 4y ago
  Backgammon is a game I wish I’d picked up young. Anything that lasts that long is worth a look. Edit: I meant lasts that long in the sense of being played for the past 5 millennia. I didn’t mean the duration of a game.
ghaff 4y ago
>Two player games do have an advantage as you only need two of you. While not to encourage being antisocial, chess also has very good computer programs to play against--and even provide instruction. I assume there are good consumer accessible Go programs these days too although I haven't looked for a while. It's nice to have as a backup and, in general, I find computer card games are less capable or have annoying blind spots that you can suss out after a while. For example, I've found that computer Hearts programs are pretty vulnerable to shooting the moon against them. Backgammon could be good--although I never really got into it. I suppose Checkers is another option but, of course, relatively simple. Although I'm even worse at Go than I am at Chess, I agree with you. Chess probably has at least an easier learning curve to get to some minimal level of competence.
- valec 4y ago
  >While not to encourage being antisocial, chess also has very good computer programs to play against even better, with the likes of Lichess and Chess.com there is near instant placement into matches with a similarly skilled human
- xhevahir 4y ago
  It's much better to play go against human competitors; there are several servers where you can do that. The best place for tips is probably the Sensei's Library website.
  - xiaodai 4y ago
    No. www.reddit.com/r/proweiqi
bsder 4y ago
In addition, most bridge is boring as hell. You study all these cool bidding problems. You work out how to drop the offside 10 when held against. Then, you sit down at a table with other people ... And get a single semi-interesting hand the entire night. Mostly everything is perfectly obvious bidding and perfectly obvious play. "Trick, Trick, claim" -- "Trick, Trick, Trick, Trick, claim" -- etc. However, to be fair, "boring" is probably a good thing if bridge is regarded as a social activity. I find that I really can't be "social" playing chess. The "a single mistake can sink you" aspect of chess makes it too mentally demanding.
- Chris_Newton 4y ago
  In addition, most bridge is boring as hell. I’m sorry that’s been your experience. If you find that most of your games are routine and entirely obvious, you might like to make sure you’re shuffling the cards properly before each deal. A classic problem particularly with social bridge is that you have a deck or two and someone just does a casual overhand shuffle or three between deals. That doesn’t mix the cards up anything like enough and tends to result in lots more bland, even deals than there ought to be with truly random shuffling. I don’t know anything about your standard or the level of people you play with, but it’s also possible that your group tend to be very conservative bidders. If few of your auctions are competitive and usually the partnership with the stronger hands gets a free ride to a reasonable but cautious contract, it’s inevitable that you won’t face so many challenging situations in the card play stage because you’ll be under less pressure and the other side will have less information to plan their defence. If this is happening, either side could probably get much better results by being more active during the auction and so creating more challenges for their opponents and opportunities for themselves during the play.
  - mercutio2 4y ago
    I think the problem here is that rubber bridge is just very low intensity compared to most modern games. Of course there’s a frisson when you correctly bid a slam or sacrifice to prevent your opponents from finding theirs. But most bridge players don’t even know how to recognize a borderline slam, and they just bid a game and don’t contest, leaving things pretty low stakes. It’s so unfortunate that it takes 8 to play duplicate, as duplicate is my favorite of all games. But I understand why people don’t get excited about bridge for 4.
tasuki 4y ago
> I think Go is a more interesting game than chess but the scoring is a little hard to teach It's not just the scoring part, the goal of the game is somewhat elusive. Surround more than the opponent, how do I even get started? Chess, despite having way more complicated rules, has an immediately obvious goal: capture the king.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  You still can teach it even to small kids. It is fun, even if the scoring details are not fully understood.
- throw123123123 4y ago
  You can start with Atari-Go, thats pretty obvious for a while, and then 9x9 scoring is relatively easy. I think there are other reasons not to teach go than this one.
  - tasuki 4y ago
    > I think there are other reasons not to teach go than this one. Mind elaborating? I'm very interested in this topic! I made a rather large survey mostly among the European go players as to why they play go, learning why one shouldn't play/learn/teach go (pick any) would be even more exciting!
    - throw123123123 4y ago
      The worst thing that could happen is that they like the game and end up spending thousands of grueling work for a thankless game. Source: former professional-aspiring player
      - tasuki 4y ago
        I have probably spent thousands of hours playing/studying go. I did it because I enjoyed doing it, and enjoyed getting better. No regrets at all. I never had aspirations to become a professional player, which probably explains the difference between our experiences. I've met many hikaru-no-go-powered "professional-aspiring" players, most of whom didn't even achieve dan level. It seems a recipe for disappointment and bitterness.
7thaccount 4y ago
I read the rules of Go, bought some books on it, watched some videos, and played several games. I never had a clue what I was doing. Was I winning or losing? I couldn't tell. I had very little strategy. Even as a child, chess was so much more straight forward. Bridge has always seemed similar to Go IMO from a "what in the world" kind of view. I started going to a bridge club and took a few classes. I kinda understood bidding, but never what was going on. I know people actually figure it out, but I honestly felt like it was some kind of cosmic joke on me lol.
- ngcc_hk 4y ago
  Get a free app and 9x9 should not be hard. For the real 19x19, need a teacher I think.
- smohare 4y ago
  Interesting. Most folk I know fairly rapidly develop a basic intuition around Go as at the initial phases one leverages basic pattern recognition, which humans are good at. I think the issue you raise though is fundamental to the beauty of the game, which is that subtle differences in play have drastic emergent consequences.
  - 7thaccount 4y ago
    You're not making me feel better :) Maybe the pattern recognition just takes awhile. It took me quite a few games for "Set" to become natural.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Fine, since you came out of the closet, I will too. I don’t understand Wordle, solitaire, bridge, or minesweeper. I can write a compiler soup to nuts… But I can’t figure out minesweeper.
  - relaxing 4y ago
    That’s interesting. Maybe the games are unique in that they ask you to make inferences about the hidden state of the world, whereas the compiler has the entire program available. Still, both problems (compilation, minesweeper) can be solved through the logical repetition of a basic set of rules.
mbg721 4y ago
Bridge is basically a two-player game, where the players are pairs. It's also pretty accessible to people who are familiar with Euchre or Spades or Hearts.
- chitowneats 4y ago
  It's a four player game. You need four humans. Few people born in the last few decades are familiar with any of the games you mentioned. Euchre, for example, is probably even more esoteric than bridge.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    Every Midwestern teenager is super-friendly with Euchre. It was a big deal when I was in high-school.
    - chitowneats 4y ago
      When was that? I'm from Illinois. Not my experience in the slightest.
      - eddyfromtheblok 4y ago
        it's popular in Michigan and Indiana In Minnesota, 500, similar to euchre, is played instead, euchre is unheard of in Minnesota.
        dwd 4y ago
        I played more 500 with the extended playing deck. My brother and I were keen players and developed a number of variations, particularly suited for two or three players. One of the more fun ones was having a compulsory bid; no minimum number of tricks, but you were not allowed to bid in a way that would cause all the bids to add up to 10. You then had to make your bid exactly, so it added that element of strategically throwing tricks like you have in Hearts to force someone to go over. Standard 500 scoring if you made your bid, and -10 points for every card you were high or low.
ntr-- 4y ago
> It's hard if you are much better at a game than your children. I disagree, growing up I stalled out improving at chess because no adult around my small town could reliably beat me, give a close game or point me at any resources to improve. I'm playing at ~1500 level as an adult (having stopped playing for 20 years) so have definitely lost some potential there. These days it's not the case as there are many more easily accessible resources for children to find themselves, but a capable adult player is definitely a huge benefit as they can teach a child a lot about mindset towards competition as much as the game itself.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Area scoring is far easier to teach, especially if you're willing to ignore imprecision from not considering group tax. 'just keep going until you both agree on who can put more of your stones on the board and keep them there'.
ngcc_hk 4y ago
For Go game scoring, just use an app. Our local go club no longer count in our Rank Competition. Take a photo as a record and you get the result as well. (First 10 free for some …). Bridge if you pay the uk has a very good web site for learning.

by jvvw 4y ago

cesaref 4y ago

Definitely give backgammon a try with them. It's very easy to pick up the basics, I reckon any 9 and 11 year old will pick it up in an hour, if you avoid the doubling die and just play games out. A few evenings of this and before you know it they'll be playing tavla with a lovely turkish tea on the side and will be learning some farsi for common rolls. What's not to like?

User23 4y ago
Backgammon is a game I wish I’d picked up young. Anything that lasts that long is worth a look. Edit: I meant lasts that long in the sense of being played for the past 5 millennia. I didn’t mean the duration of a game.

ghaff 4y ago

>Two player games do have an advantage as you only need two of you. While not to encourage being antisocial, chess also has very good computer programs to play against--and even provide instruction. I assume there are good consumer accessible Go programs these days too although I haven't looked for a while. It's nice to have as a backup and, in general, I find computer card games are less capable or have annoying blind spots that you can suss out after a while. For example, I've found that computer Hearts programs are pretty vulnerable to shooting the moon against them. Backgammon could be good--although I never really got into it. I suppose Checkers is another option but, of course, relatively simple. Although I'm even worse at Go than I am at Chess, I agree with you. Chess probably has at least an easier learning curve to get to some minimal level of competence.

valec 4y ago
>While not to encourage being antisocial, chess also has very good computer programs to play against even better, with the likes of Lichess and Chess.com there is near instant placement into matches with a similarly skilled human
xhevahir 4y ago
It's much better to play go against human competitors; there are several servers where you can do that. The best place for tips is probably the Sensei's Library website.
- xiaodai 4y ago
  No. www.reddit.com/r/proweiqi

bsder 4y ago

In addition, most bridge is boring as hell. You study all these cool bidding problems. You work out how to drop the offside 10 when held against. Then, you sit down at a table with other people ... And get a single semi-interesting hand the entire night. Mostly everything is perfectly obvious bidding and perfectly obvious play. "Trick, Trick, claim" -- "Trick, Trick, Trick, Trick, claim" -- etc. However, to be fair, "boring" is probably a good thing if bridge is regarded as a social activity. I find that I really can't be "social" playing chess. The "a single mistake can sink you" aspect of chess makes it too mentally demanding.

Chris_Newton 4y ago
In addition, most bridge is boring as hell. I’m sorry that’s been your experience. If you find that most of your games are routine and entirely obvious, you might like to make sure you’re shuffling the cards properly before each deal. A classic problem particularly with social bridge is that you have a deck or two and someone just does a casual overhand shuffle or three between deals. That doesn’t mix the cards up anything like enough and tends to result in lots more bland, even deals than there ought to be with truly random shuffling. I don’t know anything about your standard or the level of people you play with, but it’s also possible that your group tend to be very conservative bidders. If few of your auctions are competitive and usually the partnership with the stronger hands gets a free ride to a reasonable but cautious contract, it’s inevitable that you won’t face so many challenging situations in the card play stage because you’ll be under less pressure and the other side will have less information to plan their defence. If this is happening, either side could probably get much better results by being more active during the auction and so creating more challenges for their opponents and opportunities for themselves during the play.
- mercutio2 4y ago
  I think the problem here is that rubber bridge is just very low intensity compared to most modern games. Of course there’s a frisson when you correctly bid a slam or sacrifice to prevent your opponents from finding theirs. But most bridge players don’t even know how to recognize a borderline slam, and they just bid a game and don’t contest, leaving things pretty low stakes. It’s so unfortunate that it takes 8 to play duplicate, as duplicate is my favorite of all games. But I understand why people don’t get excited about bridge for 4.

tasuki 4y ago

> I think Go is a more interesting game than chess but the scoring is a little hard to teach It's not just the scoring part, the goal of the game is somewhat elusive. Surround more than the opponent, how do I even get started? Chess, despite having way more complicated rules, has an immediately obvious goal: capture the king.

hutzlibu 4y ago
You still can teach it even to small kids. It is fun, even if the scoring details are not fully understood.
throw123123123 4y ago
You can start with Atari-Go, thats pretty obvious for a while, and then 9x9 scoring is relatively easy. I think there are other reasons not to teach go than this one.
- tasuki 4y ago
  > I think there are other reasons not to teach go than this one. Mind elaborating? I'm very interested in this topic! I made a rather large survey mostly among the European go players as to why they play go, learning why one shouldn't play/learn/teach go (pick any) would be even more exciting!
  - throw123123123 4y ago
    The worst thing that could happen is that they like the game and end up spending thousands of grueling work for a thankless game. Source: former professional-aspiring player
    - tasuki 4y ago
      I have probably spent thousands of hours playing/studying go. I did it because I enjoyed doing it, and enjoyed getting better. No regrets at all. I never had aspirations to become a professional player, which probably explains the difference between our experiences. I've met many hikaru-no-go-powered "professional-aspiring" players, most of whom didn't even achieve dan level. It seems a recipe for disappointment and bitterness.

7thaccount 4y ago

I read the rules of Go, bought some books on it, watched some videos, and played several games. I never had a clue what I was doing. Was I winning or losing? I couldn't tell. I had very little strategy. Even as a child, chess was so much more straight forward. Bridge has always seemed similar to Go IMO from a "what in the world" kind of view. I started going to a bridge club and took a few classes. I kinda understood bidding, but never what was going on. I know people actually figure it out, but I honestly felt like it was some kind of cosmic joke on me lol.

ngcc_hk 4y ago
Get a free app and 9x9 should not be hard. For the real 19x19, need a teacher I think.
smohare 4y ago
Interesting. Most folk I know fairly rapidly develop a basic intuition around Go as at the initial phases one leverages basic pattern recognition, which humans are good at. I think the issue you raise though is fundamental to the beauty of the game, which is that subtle differences in play have drastic emergent consequences.
- 7thaccount 4y ago
  You're not making me feel better :) Maybe the pattern recognition just takes awhile. It took me quite a few games for "Set" to become natural.
tomcam 4y ago
Fine, since you came out of the closet, I will too. I don’t understand Wordle, solitaire, bridge, or minesweeper. I can write a compiler soup to nuts… But I can’t figure out minesweeper.
- relaxing 4y ago
  That’s interesting. Maybe the games are unique in that they ask you to make inferences about the hidden state of the world, whereas the compiler has the entire program available. Still, both problems (compilation, minesweeper) can be solved through the logical repetition of a basic set of rules.

mbg721 4y ago

Bridge is basically a two-player game, where the players are pairs. It's also pretty accessible to people who are familiar with Euchre or Spades or Hearts.

chitowneats 4y ago
It's a four player game. You need four humans. Few people born in the last few decades are familiar with any of the games you mentioned. Euchre, for example, is probably even more esoteric than bridge.
- mbg721 4y ago
  Every Midwestern teenager is super-friendly with Euchre. It was a big deal when I was in high-school.
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    When was that? I'm from Illinois. Not my experience in the slightest.
    - eddyfromtheblok 4y ago
      it's popular in Michigan and Indiana In Minnesota, 500, similar to euchre, is played instead, euchre is unheard of in Minnesota.
      - dwd 4y ago
        I played more 500 with the extended playing deck. My brother and I were keen players and developed a number of variations, particularly suited for two or three players. One of the more fun ones was having a compulsory bid; no minimum number of tricks, but you were not allowed to bid in a way that would cause all the bids to add up to 10. You then had to make your bid exactly, so it added that element of strategically throwing tricks like you have in Hearts to force someone to go over. Standard 500 scoring if you made your bid, and -10 points for every card you were high or low.

ntr-- 4y ago

> It's hard if you are much better at a game than your children. I disagree, growing up I stalled out improving at chess because no adult around my small town could reliably beat me, give a close game or point me at any resources to improve. I'm playing at ~1500 level as an adult (having stopped playing for 20 years) so have definitely lost some potential there. These days it's not the case as there are many more easily accessible resources for children to find themselves, but a capable adult player is definitely a huge benefit as they can teach a child a lot about mindset towards competition as much as the game itself.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Area scoring is far easier to teach, especially if you're willing to ignore imprecision from not considering group tax. 'just keep going until you both agree on who can put more of your stones on the board and keep them there'.

ngcc_hk 4y ago

For Go game scoring, just use an app. Our local go club no longer count in our Rank Competition. Take a photo as a record and you get the result as well. (First 10 free for some …). Bridge if you pay the uk has a very good web site for learning.