Grown-ups, especially gamers, love to hate Candy Land. The game is frequently invoked as a prime example of a mindless, terrible design. But if you’re a player of a certain age or disposition, Candy Land is a fantastic experience. This happens once when you’re age three to six, and once again when you’re a profes- sional game designer.
From the 2001 rules sheet:
Welcome to Candy Land! Come and visit some very special friends who live in magical places like Peanut Brittle House, Gumdrop Mountains, Molasses Swamp and other sweet spots. . . . Be the first player to reach the Candy Castle by landing on the multi-colored space at the end of the path.
Candy Land is indeed self-working and simple. The board is a single track composed of colored spaces, and the deck is a mix of colored cards. On your turn, you draw a card and move forward to the next space of that color. Some cards have two colored squares; in that case, you move ahead to the second matching space. A few special cards, such as the one for Queen Frostine, jump you to spe- cific spaces on the board. This kind of card can even send you backward, if you’ve already passed that space. Three of the spaces make you lose one turn, and two are shortcuts.
A few details have changed since the game’s first release. The “lose a turn” spaces used to be much worse: you had to draw a specific color to escape them. The multicolored end space was added to make it more clear that you could win by drawing any color that wasn’t on a space in front of you. By the 2004 edition, the special cards could no longer send you backward and “molasses” turned into “chocolate” because apparently nobody bakes at home any more.
I started playing Candy Land with my daughter Nora when she was three. And as a child’s first game, it does the job. It allows kids and parents to play together on a level field, and builds up the child’s understanding of what a game is. Kids have some natural sense for this, but they need some practice with the finer points of taking turns, following rules, and learning to lose graciously. Okay, for the first few games Mom and Dad cheated so that Nora always won. It’s a sign that your child is ready to play fair when she actually notices that you’re cheating.
Candy Land has what all children’s games need: a compelling theme and a very easy set of rules. The theme is candy, though interestingly, you’re not acquiring candy, just traveling through Candy Land. The rules are clear enough that children can easily follow them, with no math or reading skills, and simple enough that Nora, now seven, can still remember how to play the game after it spent more than a year on the shelf.
Games are about challenges, and grown-ups don’t typically like Candy Land because it doesn’t provide them with any choices. They often express this feeling by saying “there is no strategy.” But there are many popular adult games that invite no actual strategy, but plenty of choices. In craps, for example, there are plenty of betting options, but they only barely affect your results. By this measure, Candy Land and craps are pretty much the same game.
For a three-year-old, there are plenty of challenges in a game like Candy Land, because it’s a challenge just remembering whose turn it is. Adding choices, even empty ones, would just be confounding. Plus, with no decisions there are no wrong decisions, so kids can have a fair chance of beating their parents and don’t feel as responsible when they don’t win.
All of this explains why Candy Land is great for kids, which isn’t really a hard case to make. Now I’m going to tell you why it’s also great for game designers — or anyone else who wants to think about games more deeply.
When grown-ups talk about Candy Land they tend to use analytical terms. Self-working game. High volatility. Markov chain. They don’t typically talk about roleplaying. But for a child, Candy Land is clearly a roleplaying game. Kids can play Candy Land without even understanding what a Markov chain is. Honestly, I had to explain it three times to Nora.
Everything grown-ups know about games comes from socialization and prac- tice. As a first-time gamer, Nora didn’t have any of this. So her approach to Candy Land was the most interesting to me when she was first learning it. When I got “stuck on a gooey gumdrop,” Nora would move her pawn back to that space and help get me 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, too.
Nora initially went through an “everyone wins” phase, in which the goal of the game was for everyone to reach the end, in no particular order. Then she got it in her head that she wanted to win first, and eventually she adopted the grown-up attitude, which is that the game is over when the first person hits the finish line. This is one of the more artificial features of a game, actually, and as a designer it’s interesting for me to consider games where a more community-based approach is appropriate, where the goal is for everyone to win. If that makes sense to a three- year-old, why doesn’t it make sense to us?
Candy Land is a great educational game for kids and adults. It lets each gen- eration pass along its own perspective about what a game is supposed to be. In A Theory of Fun, Raph Koster says that games are fun when they provide just enough challenge to be interesting, but not so much that they become confusing. When a player thinks he’s seen all there is, he decides the game is boring. Sadly, this can happen when you haven’t really seen everything, but you think you have.
Anyone who thinks he has seen all of Candy Land ought to play it again with a child.
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