How do you playtest a board game for 5-year-olds?
How do you playtest a board game for 5-year-olds?
How do you playtest a board game for 5-year-olds?
By Charlie Hall
August 4, 2021
Summary
It's no wonder then that some of the world's best educational children's games are made there as well.
How do you go about designing games for five-year-olds? HABA, the German toymaker with bestselling board games like First Orchard and Dragon's Breath, may have the answer.
"We take the games and play them with the children in kindergarten. That's a big part of testing these pre-selected games, because sometimes we think, 'Well, they could be good for kids.'".
His job is to evaluate HABA's entire catalog of roughly 300 games, and then align those games to learning goals it's trying to support.
In game design terms, he's also there to simply lay out what children are capable of doing at what age, effectively helping tailor a game to meet a very specific audience of players - and the parents and educators that serve them.
It's the mechanics of these family-style games where the rubber really meets the road. Freund says that lots of attention was initially given to the hammer itself.
An expanded version of the popular Rhino Hero game by HABA. It's a card stacking game where parents and children can compete on relatively even footing.
Reference
Hall, C. (2021, August 04). How do you playtest a board game for 5-year-olds? Retrieved October 14, 2021, from https://www.polygon.com/tabletop-games/22608427/bestselling-childrens-board-games-haba-yellow-boxes-child-psychologist-hammer-time