This Designer Was Tired of Kids Game Sucking, So They Made Their Own. And They Kick Ass.
For the past year, Elan Lee has been collaborating with his daughter to design a series of games meant to be enjoyed by both kids and adults. It's a resounding success.
Most kid games are terrible, whether it’s card games, board games, or video games. They look down on the audience, and rarely feel like they were made for anyone—the kids or the adults—to have a good experience. They exist to pass time. And yet, we’ve all played Chutes and Ladders, Uno, or any number of “family friendly” games, because the rules are simple enough for them to grasp. It often ends in frustration. Most are poorly designed, and sacrifice thoughtfulness for rules centered on luck.
Surely, there must be a better way?
That hope is what fueled Elan Lee, designer and co-founder at Exploding Kittens, the group behind popular card games like the similarly titled Exploding Kittens and You’ve Got Crabs, to launch four new games: Hurry Up Chicken Butt, I Want My Teeth Back, My Parents Might Be Martians, The Best Worst Ice Cream. Importantly, Lee did not design these games on his own. They were made over several years with his own daughter.
When Lee’s daughter, Avalon, turned four years old, he was excited. She could now understand basic games, and it presented a chance to bridge the gap between parent and child. His daughter couldn’t play games Lee works on at his job, but these? Yes!
“We bought a bunch of games, and we opened them up and we played them—and they sucked,” said Lee in an interview recently. “Just the worst. She could see that I was having a miserable time and I was getting frustrated. We're used to playing games together—imagination games and storytelling and running around. She'll always say, ‘Can we play again?’ And I'm like ‘Yeah, of course, let's play again.’ But for the first time ever, she was seeing me say, ‘I really don't want to play again.’”
Lee didn’t specifically name the games that didn’t click, but amidst the continued disappointment, a parenting lesson looped back around. When a toy breaks in the Lee household, he explained, a family mantra is to try and fix what’s busted, instead of immediately buying a new one. As Lee’s frustration mounted and he was turning down requests to play with his daughter, she turned and said three words: “let’s fix it.”
“I didn't know what that meant,” said Lee. “But it stopped me in my tracks to think ‘Right, we have raised her to say when there's a problem, try to figure out how to fix it.’ [..] I live in breathe game design, so I ought to be able to fix it, but what does that actually mean?”
One of Lee’s first creative touchstones was Pixar, a studio famous for producing kids-targeted films that are equally entertaining for adults, so long as we forget the terrifying Cars franchise exists. If Pixar could do that for movies, why not games?
“It took us a long time, it took us more than a year of tinkering,” said Lee, whose daughter is now five years old. “But finally, we got to this place where we would finish playing one of these games and she would look at me and say, "Let's play again," and I'd say, ‘Hell yes. Let's play again.’”
Over the course of the past year, Lee and his daughter have worked on more than four games, but the four that are now available at Target or on Exploding Kittens’ website, part of a new label called Kitten Games, are the following:
Hurry Up Chicken Butt: A variation of hot potato where players shake an adorable plastic chicken with a colored die. The die corresponds to a similar-colored card in front of the players, and then the player has to perform the described action, like “go around everyone and march with your knees as high as you can.” The “chicken butt” part comes from rolling pink, which means the player has to yell “hurry up chicken butt,” run to wherever the chicken butt card has been placed by someone before the game started, and then return to the play space. It’s a riot.
My Parents Might Be Martians: A charades-style game where parents and kids split into opposing teams, with one key caveat: the kids always win. It’s a game meant to help model what it means to be a good winner and loser. The adults read a word and either act it out or describe it using single syllable words. It’s harder than it sounds and makes you sound very goofy, thus the Martian aspect. The adults are split into their own teams and the children rack up points for guessing right for either adult, which engineers the children to always have more.
The Best Worst Ice Cream: Five (disgusting) ice cream flavors are placed at the center of the play space, and it’s your job to collect enough individual ice cream scoops to fill your plate. You earn scoops by guessing what flavor is on the other side of a card you’re flipping, but here’s the trick: the card gives you three options to pick from and one is guaranteed to be on the other side. The other trick: if you guess wrong, you place the scoop next to the flavor in the play space. Suddenly, you may think the next card is green slime, but if there are six earthworm flavors on the board, you might want to pick that instead.
I Want My Teeth Back: A spinner game about risk and reward, where players try to collect enough teeth to fill up their mouth card. The spinner has two (decently generous) spots where, if it lands, players are rewarded with however many teeth have accumulated on the board. Again, there’s a trick: the more cards you accumulate, the more spins you can take. Deploying one card gives you one spin, two cards gives you three spins, three cards gives you five spins. The only card players have to play on a turn is one that adds new teeth to the board. Otherwise, you can sit, wait, and gather more cards for more spins and, possibly, more teeth.
I’ve played all of these with my family and they’re great. I’ll probably purchase a second set for our family lake house. Full recommendation. (I’ll have more to say about that experience soon, where I’ll detail what it’s like to play these games with a three-year-old who wants to bend the rules in the direction of how they want to play.)
What’s interesting about all four is how the dynamics changed over time. There are what I’d call luck-ish elements, but it’s not pure luck. The kids have agency in events, and the arc of the game is not determined by flipping a card and hoping for the best.
“Games minus mastery equals boring,” said Lee. “When you're done playing a game, the whole reason that you want to play a game again is because you think you can do better the second time. You think you can have a little bit more fun, you think you can optimize how you're playing.”
My oldest likes Uno, but mostly for the chaos. It also didn’t start that way. Uno was a nightmare, because it felt like luck. It about lucking into cards. Is it funny when a friend flips over 10 cards looking for one that lets their play advance? Yes. Is it funny for a five-year-old to flip over 10 cards, realizing they’re now losing? No, it’s awful.
“We bought a bunch of games, and we opened them up and we played them—and they sucked. Just the worst. She could see that I was having a miserable time and I was getting frustrated. We're used to playing games together—imagination games and storytelling and running around. She'll always say, ‘Can we play again?’ And I'm like ‘Yeah, of course, let's play again.’ But for the first time ever, she was seeing me say, ‘I really don't want to play again.’”
“Kids are perceptive, [though] they might not be able to articulate why,” said Lee. “But luck games suck, and they suck because you will never get better at that game, you will never have more fun playing that game, and it's a crutch. People put in a luck aspect to a game when they're stumped. Either they're stumped on how to actually solve game design, or they just don't have very much faith in their audience.”
Arguably, the former (stumped on design) informs the latter (little faith in the audience), because expectations for children entertainment is traditionally low. This is across all kids entertainment, and as such, parents get used to low standards. Toys break easily because they’re made from cheap plastic, kid games have bad rule sets.
It simply feels part of the package.
Take The Best Worst Ice Cream. I called a mechanic luck-ish, but really, it’s randomness. Randomness is not luck, because within randomness can be strategy.
“You'll see the little cogs in their brains start to turn,” said Lee. “as they know, ‘Look, I have to guess. I have a one-in-three chance.’ But as a five-year-old, as a four-year-old, I'm starting to do statistical analysis. Now, obviously, I'd never call it that as a four-year-old, but I'm [the kid] starting to think about it in this beautiful, beautiful way. And when you watch your kid do that, you're not telling them to do that, they just figure it out...it's incredible.”
My Parents Might Be Martians, alternatively, is rigged. The difference is that it’s rigged in favor of the kids, as they’re always amassing twice as many points as the parents. An older child might figure out it’s rigged, but most won’t. Besides the game being fun and parents looking goofy, it’s an opportunity for children to witness something that doesn’t always happen in games: the parents have to model being a good loser.
“The kid always wins and celebrates and the first time your kid wins, they're a jerk, right?” said Lee. “Bragging. But you can remind them, ‘Hey, we worked really hard, we tried really hard, you gotta to tell us it's okay, you gotta to tell us you'll do better next time.’ And you train them that way. They're watching mom and dad lose, and watching that behavior because mom and dad will always lose this game 100% of the time. They cannot win. So the kids are watching ‘Well, how do mom and dad behave when they lose this game?”
When Lee stumbled into this, his daughter was four. But she’s five now. The difference between a four-year-old and a five-year-old is vast, a gap you cannot fully grasp until you’re around children all the time and notice the small ways they change.
I asked Lee if he accounted for, or dealt with, such changes making the games.
He paused.
“It brings a little tear to my eye, because there was one game that I loved, and she loved when she was four,” he said. “She turned five, and it just fell up. She just lost interest in it. It was a really, really fun game. It was this dice stacking game, [where] you roll dice and based on what comes up, you make little towers. She turned five, and she's just like, ‘Yeah, this is too easy. There's nothing here. It's just too easy for me.’ I was like, ‘Oh, yesterday this was a challenge, so what happened?”
Anyone who’s been around children for extended periods of time has experienced a moment like this, and it goes beyond being interested in Paw Patrol one day and Spider-Man the next. Their brains are bodies are changing so fast, visibly and invisibly.
And so, the dice stacking game isn’t shipping. It’s not the only one. Lee and his daughter worked on 12 games in total, and these are the four that made it to the end.
The process has been illuminating for Lee, because while he’s been involved at shipping more than 20 games at Exploding Kittens, this is his first time developing anything for children. It’s a fundamentally different enterprise, with different goals.
“Designing games like that has really crystallized [that] the secret to making a really good kids game is a game that shines a spotlight on the kid,” he said. “The kid can't notice the spotlight. But the parents, the grown ups, have to look at it, and just feel so proud and so amazed.”
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Also:
Good, thoughtful rules are great, but kids are still kids, and we still had to navigate the children getting upset at winning and losing. But it’s better.
It’s a small thing, but the the boxes for these game are so nice! It reminds me of opening an Apple product, honestly. Plus, they’re very easy to put back in the box.
Do you have any other recommendations for good kid games? Please drop them in the comments, and let’s try to put together a list of games that are not Uno.
I played “Outfoxed” with my 5 year old niece. It’s a collaborative detective game a little like Clue. She loved it - she kept wanting to play the “chicken detective” game
My 4yo is still struggling with playing any games with 'rules', but loves to play *with* games, especially my own heavier games like Wingspan, and finding new uses for all the pieces. HABA's range of childrens games are particularly good at engendering a sense of play, often including multiple rulesets, rather than just being about winning or losing.