Retheming for Kids - Games With a "Younger" Version

 Kids Need (Good) Games Too!

There are so many board games out there for kids, it can be overwhelming choosing something good to play with them. For every great game like Rhino Hero and Outfoxed!, there's hundreds of mediocre games like Cootie, Candy Land, and Chutes and Ladders. I'm not saying that the games are "bad" per se, but there are far better games to be able to play with my kids than ones that make me bored after five minutes and I don't think they really keep my daughter's attention much either.

As I've built up my collection of games, I've found that I want to introduce my daughter to good games that will pique her interest and keep her coming back to play more and more with me. I know that this is just a parent wanting to share his hobbies with his kids, but there's something so special to me about connecting with my daughter to play games together. It was something I loved to do as a kid when I got the chance, and to be able to pass that joy and experience onto my daughter is something I would love to accomplish.

That thought got me thinking about games that had been rebuilt or reimplemented with the idea of playing with younger kids. That train of thought led me to My Lil' Everdell, and other games like Quacks & Co.: Quedlinburg Dash, and well, here we are. I thought it would be fun to look through a few reimplementations of games that were turned into a "kid-friendly" version of the game. Keep in mind, most of these I have not had the opportunity to play, but I do want to try some of them to see how they feel compared to the original version.

My Lil' Everdell

Release Year: 2022
Designer(s): James A. Wilson, Clarissa A. Wilson
Reimplementation of: Everdell
Age Recommendation: 6+ (on the box), 8+ (by the BGG Community)
Differences in the Games: My Lil' Everdell distills the base game down to a much simpler to understand worker-placement game for younger kids to understand. While it still retains much of the same DNA that the original game had, it's designed around limiting choices for what kids can build in their cities and makes the end-goals much more reasonable. There is a bit of randomness with the dice rolling, but My Lil' Everdell distills it all down into an easier package to introduce kiddos to the world of worker-placement games.

Quacks & Co.: Quedlinburg Dash

Release Year: 2022
Designer(s): Wolfgang Warsch
Reimplementation of: The Quacks of Quedlinburg
Age Recommendation: 6+ (on the box), 4-12 (by the BGG Community)
Differences in the Games: Whereas base Quacks of Quedlinburg has the potential for players to lose out on scoring, Quacks and Co. sees players racing their animals to the market, building their bag of feed along the way. While the original game has players placing their chips back in the bag each round, buying chips once per turn, Quacks and Co. has players only add new chips in once they have been bought from the market. There are two sides to each board, representing a more basic version on one side and a harder variant on the other, to play with older kids. While it doesn't feature the same push your luck element that the base game does, this still is an excellent introduction to bag-builders for kids.

My Little Scythe

Release Year: 2017
Designer(s): Hoby Chou, Vienna Chou
Reimplementation of: Scythe
Age Recommendation: 8+ (on the box), 6+ (by the BGG Community)
Differences in the Games: Distilling the alternative history of Scythe into a cute, animal-based version in My Little Scythe is a stroke of genius. While the original game has a bit more of a darker tone to it, since it's a war-torn eastern Europe, My Little Scythe has a decidedly much friendlier feel to it. Younger players will enjoy making pies, gathering fruits and gems, and making friends (or engaging in pie fights). There's much of the original game's DNA in My Little Scythe, but toned down for younger audiences to make it a bit less intimidating.

My First Carcassonne

Release Year: 2009
Designer(s): Marco Teubner
Reimplementation of: Carcassonne
Age Recommendation: 6+ (on the box), 4-12 (by the BGG Community)
Differences in the Games: While Carcassonne might be another gateway game, it was reimplemented for a younger audience in 2009 with My First Carcassonne. Rather than having to match edges from tile to tile as in the original, all tiles match in My First Carcassonne and when the road is completed, players put down a meeple to match the colors of the children on the completed roads. Once players have placed all their meeples, they win and the game is over. Its an even further simplification of the classic game and is designed to help kids with spatial reasoning that is needed with the original game.

Dragomino

Release Year: 2020
Designer(s): Bruno Cathala, Marie Fort, Wilfried Fort
Reimplementation of: Kingdomino
Age Recommendation: 5+ (on the box), 4-12 (by the BGG Community)
Differences in the Games: While Kingdomino isn't the most difficult game to learn, Dragomino takes the ideas from the original game and makes them easier to understand for younger kids. Instead of a drafting mechanic to determine who goes first, the turn order is determined by the dragon egg tokens that players take when two landscape tiles match. If that egg is empty, they can take the mother dragon, which allows them to take first pick, or they earn 1 point for baby dragons. After 7 rounds, the game ends and whomever has the most points wins. It's a simpler version of Kingdomino that is geared towards younger kids, but I don't think that it really needed to be distilled further since the original game is recommended for 6+ by the community.

Agricola: Family Edition

Release Year: 2016
Designer(s): Uwe Rosenberg
Reimplementation of: Agricola
Age Recommendation: 8+ (on the box), 8+ (by the BGG Community)
Differences in the Games: Taking the gameplay of Agricola and removing the possibility to lose points, Agricola: Family Edition adds in quite a few more quality of life changes from one of the more recent versions of Agricola (All Creatures Big and Small). While there are quite a few similarities with the original game, the new action each round in the family version is fixed for each round and never changes, as well as a simplification of the game by removing stones and vegetables. Buildings now score for extra resources at the end of the game as well, and this represents a much more forgiving version of the game than the original version.

Ticket to Ride: First Journey (U.S.)

Release Year: 2016
Designer(s): Alan R. Moon
Reimplementation of: Ticket to Ride
Age Recommendation: 6+ (on the box), 6+ (by the BGG Community)
Differences in the Games: While Ticket to Ride is an excellent introductory game for many people, it's been further distilled down to make it easier for kids to understand. The 45 trains in the original game are shrunk down to 20 trains per player and routes have smaller numbers of cards that are required to complete them. The game ends when one person has finished 6 tickets, or has laid down all 20 trains, making it much shorter than the original game, whilst still retaining much of the same feel and gameplay of the original.

Catan: Junior

Release Year: 2011
Designer(s): Klaus Teuber
Reimplementation of: CATAN
Age Recommendation: 6+ (on the box), 4-12 (by the BGG Community)
Differences in the Games: While CATAN might be a classic, it does have a limitation of being 3-4 players only. Catan Junior removes that limitation and allows players to play 2-4 players, all while exploring islands as a pirate captain and crew. It's a fun mix on the original concept and while players still utilize resources to build ships and forts, the board features specific starting points for each of the four colors and standard layouts, rather than the randomized board of the original game. The game also features trading, but it can be limited to the bank only for younger players to make the game easier. It's a clever little retheme of the original game to include some fun for younger kiddos to experience a classic board game.

My First Stone Age

Release Year: 2016
Designer(s): Marco Teubner
Reimplementation of: Stone Age
Age Recommendation: 5+ (on the box), 4-10 (by the BGG Community)
Differences in the Games: With a memory game component thrown into the mix of My First Stone Age, players seek to be the first one to build three huts on their player board. It's a much simpler version of Stone Age that distills the worker-placement mechanic down to more of a memory-based game. Whereas the original Stone Age could be brutal with not having enough resources to feed your stone age tribe, My First Stone Age is all about collecting the correct resources to build the houses. It's one of the few games on this list that doesn't feature similar gameplay mechanics, only sharing theme with the original game.

Andor: The Family Fantasy Game

Release Year: 2020
Designer(s): Inka Brand, Markus Brand
Reimplementation of: Legends of Andor
Age Recommendation: 6+ (on the box), 4-12 (by the BGG Community)
Differences in the Games: Like it's bigger predecessor, Andor: The Family Fantasy Game, is a cooperative quest-taking game where players seek to rescue wolf pups before the dragon reaches the town and destroys it. While the original game features a six-part arc that players proceed through over several scenarios, the family version features a similar story, but changing priorities to get past the troll that guards the cave where the pups might be. It's a clever little twist on the game that references the Legend of Andor, but rather than an overarching story, it's all contained within one play of the game.

Final Thoughts

It is interesting to me that there are so many games out there that attempt to distill the original game down to something that younger kids can enjoy. Whilst many do feature much of the same mechanics and ideas, sometimes there can be stumbles that occur with those games as often games geared towards kids can feel a bit too simple.

The best kids game is one that balances fun with strategy, and maybe a bit of chaos added to it for good measure. At least, that's what I've found when I've played several of my daughter's games. The hard thing about games, especially kids games, is that you don't know if something really will be good until you play it. Usually after the first one or two plays, I can tell if a game would be something that I enjoy long-term, but kids are funny and they might enjoy something far more than an adult would, just because it captures their attention.

On the other hand, if I'm going to be playing a game with my daughter, I personally want to make sure that I'm playing something that I enjoy and will want to play again. There's only so many times that I can play a simple game before I want to play something else, and my daughters are fortunate enough that they have a mom and dad with good taste.

Give me your thoughts:What are your thoughts on reimplementing games for a younger audience? Are there any games that you'd recommend for parents looking to introduce games to kids? What is your favorite reimplementation from an "adult" game to a kids game?

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*Originally posted on BoardGameGeek on 29/7/2024*