It is an endless source of entertainment to me to watch how well cooperative games work with young children. A preschool-age child who is not culturally trained to see all games as competition can get excited about finding out which car will win a race even if cars are not assigned to players.


Z had a great time with HABA's "Rev Up" game, which combines a "memory" backbone with chance elements to propel cars through a race.


The only vaguely competitive aspect is whether a player will achieve a match and thus be able to move a car and contribute to the overall racing activity. The penalty for a mismatch is that one is "sitting out" the round as far as advancing the race is concerned.


I was always a pretty competitive game player growing up, and in some ways still am. But as with anything we do to try to help our child develop skills beyond our own, sincerity pays off.

I once thought that by furnishing cooperative games for Z and playing them with her, we'd be teaching her to have a cooperative task orientation in later life. In fact, by playing them together we're all meditating on the value of cooperative play, where the focus becomes the challenge posed by the game to us. This is unavoidably a learning experience for everyone, perhaps especially for those of us who have surrendered to the real world and its often abrasive daily competition.



The real "trick" that the young players don't get (or care about) is the one thing that makes it truly a "kids' game": there is no limit to how long you can work to achieve the goal. This is a kind of magic, as it preserves the possibility of success and, barring disaster, assures it, but children still feel a sense of suspense as they clamber towards their goal. This is probably fundamentally linked to a child's wild imaginative abilities, and whenever she grows out of it I will be sorry to see it go.

On that note, I've noticed that Z is only now just beginning to enjoy playing a game that has a time element involved - previously, whenever we've played a game with a timer (Cranium's Balloon Lagoon, for example) she has begged to do it without the time pressure. Unfortunately, when you're dealing with a game designed to be timed, time is often the only natural limiter on activity, meaning that without a timer she could go on flipping frogs into a volcano (pond, whatever) for...ever....


HABA's "Rev Up" game ($15), as well as a broad range of other cooperative games by HABA, Family Pastimes, and others, are available at Amazon.com.