Are Classic Games like Candyland and Battleship Devoid of any Decision-Making?

By Queuebot in Toys on Jan 27, 2009 at 12:50 pm

Blogger Steven Johnson took a close look at a couple of the classic games of our childhood and came to a sobering conclusion: games like Battleship and Candyland require virtually no real decision-making whatsoever. I wonder, does this makes them any more or less enjoyable?

…there is absolutely nothing about the initial exploratory sequence of Battleship that requires anything resembling a genuine decision. It is a roulette wheel. A random number generator could easily stay competitive for the first half…And Battleship might as well be Battleship Potemkin compared to something like Candy Land, which was fiendishly designed to prevent the player from ever having to make a single decision while playing the game…

Link – via boingboing

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by mrbabyman.

Tags: Battleship, boardgames, Candyland

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Alex
Jan 27th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
I’ve never played Candyland, so I don’t know about that, but I disagree about Battleship being completely random.

In that game, only the first step is random. Once you get a “hit” then it’s not random – you have to explore the statistically most probable places to sink your enemy’s battleship. The initial randomness is very much like real life …
Edward
Jan 27th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
I win at Battleship 80% of the time. I love playing against people who play randomly.
R2K
Jan 27th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Battleship is mad hard. Dont talk trash.
Alex
Jan 27th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Even if the games are completely random, they teach a valuable life lesson: a lot of real life is randomness!
Christophe
Jan 27th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
I disagree on battleship too : I’ve always played diagonals (ex : A1, B2, C1, and not A2, B2, etc.) as they give you twice more chance to hit a ship (you divide in fact the grid in 2).
Also when choosing the diagonals try to find the big boats first (ex : A1+A5 for the 5 squares boat and so on. In that example choosing A3 then clears all boats on this half line).
Then you have to know your adversary : will he always spread his fleet or be more creative?
Like Edwards, I like people playing randomly
SenorMysterioso
Jan 27th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
I never like the games where you rolled a die and simply moved your piece, trying to get to the end first like snakes/chutes and ladders, candyland, sorry, etc.

I enjoyed trivia or strategy games a lot more.

Speaking of trivia – Online tests for jeopardy contestants are going on for the next 3 days. Neat people go represent!
andrew
Jan 27th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
I played a game of monopoly recently. and apart from some negotiation ability and deciding when you can afford to put houses up it’s very much random. the roll of the dice determines who wins most of the time.
sw
Jan 27th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
the point of candyland is to teach preschoolers the concept of game playing and turn taking, which is a very valuable skill. and face-to-face interaction with a human over a game board is at least as valuable as decision making with a tv screen.
Dan Smith
Jan 27th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
even when i was a little kid i didn’t get candyland

the game is non-existent. you might as well play dice.

to the person who said monopoly is random: what…?
Morris
Jan 27th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
I think both are very important games. Candyland teaches kids how to play a board game. While there is not much decision making, they do get to enjoy the roll of the dice to see what happens. This helps them develope an interest in competition. Then they can move on to more difficult games.

I agree with others that Battleship does require strategy. If you limited the amount of moves to successfully hit all battleships, you would quickly see people develope strategies. Since you are playing someone else, the moves are limited to how many the other player needs. A good battleship player can win over and over. That isn’t random chance.
erak
Jan 27th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Personally, I’ve always found Battleship boring and the luck-of-the-dice element in Monopoly pretty dire. (I prefer my dice games with more of a press-your-luck element like Yahtzee or Can’t Stop.)

As mentioned in the comments of that article, boardgamegeek.com is a great source for discovering great new boardgames you’ve never heard of. The best ones to start with are Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne or Blokus. (In fact, Blokus can be found just about anywhere. Though it takes 2 minutes to learn, you have to be pretty sharp to win.)
Brooks Bell
Jan 28th, 2009 at 1:03 am
Some Monopoly squares (like the St. James and Tennessee) are much more likely to get landed on than others (like Mediterranean ) due to the game mechanisms (frequency of being sent to the Jail sell, two dice resulting in numbers nearer to 7, etc.

Candyland is entirely random depending on the shuffle of the card deck. However if you cheat and arrange the deck then it is completely deterministic.

My kids quickly figured out that they could cheat by stacking the deck. Once they started doing this I encouraged them to carry it out all the way until they win. If you think about it is equivalent to program execution on a computer, albeit simplified.
Christophe
Jan 28th, 2009 at 6:54 am
Several years ago I put the whole game of Monopoly and its probabilities through MS Excel and got out with the best return on investment places. There is still the randomization of the dice, the price you need to pay for the green streets (good ROI but expensive to buy and built), and after a while the “tipping” of the game when people begin to fall on big streets with hotel and the amount to pay is too big.

It’s kind of sad to grow up
ted
Jan 28th, 2009 at 8:14 am
Scrabble was always fun.
Kento
Jan 28th, 2009 at 10:30 am
I too clicked on the comments section to argue that Battleship is not random. There is not much depth to the strategy, but if you hit A2 and B1 and hit nothing, then there is no reason to attack A1.
Bob Brown
Jan 28th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
We played the alternate Candy Land rules with my 3 year old daughter and she loved it. You pick up 2 cards and choose which one to use.
She would pick ones that didn’t take her as far in exchange for another chance to take a jump ahead. She would also choose cards that would make the game last longer so someone sent back to the Ginger Bread Man would have time to catch up.
Erica
Oct 13th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
i love playing games!
Erica
Oct 13th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
These games make me so addicted to them i just want to play them alot and do fun things with my friends all night while playing games:))))))))))))))))))))

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