Updated: October 17, 2016

Over the weekend my 6-year old daughter was playing with a pretend wand, doing what every 6-year old is supposed to do to her dad: make him do silly things. She would touch me with the wand and go, “Jump like a frog!” or “Walk around in circles!” And of course, I performed these actions in a crowded park without shame or reservations, because these are the things we do for our kids.

I even added a twist to the game. After performing each action (and once her laughter died down) I would say “Oh, that wand doesn’t work on me, it’s not making me do anything.” Her first few attempts to convince me (“See? You just jumped on one leg!”) failed, so she changed her strategy. She got quiet for a minute, clearly thinking through the problem of how she would get me to admit that she’s making me do stupid things. Then she looked up, touched me with the wand, and said, “Realize that the wand is working on you.” And that was it. How could I continue my ruse without breaking the core internal rules of the game? I relented.

Now, forgive my bias, but that’s a bloody brilliant solution to the problem. It’s a level of meta-thinking that I didn’t think a 6-year old would be capable of. But there she was, foiling my master plan to derive at least some enjoyment from the humiliation she was so gleefully putting me through. I readily admit that in this particular instance I got solidly beaten.

I mention this because there’s something else we’ve been doing a lot of recently, and that’s playing board games together. We started simple (i.e. boring for adults), but very soon moved on to more complicated games, and I think I’m now more excited than she is about our daily play sessions. And I have a feeling it’s changing the way she thinks. I’m pretty sure board games are teaching her how to think ahead, solve problems, and weigh the longer-term consequences of her actions. And maybe—I have to retain some dignity here, ok?—maybe that’s why she was able to beat me so cleverly in the wand game.

So with that pre-amble, I wanted to write down a short list of the games that we’ve enjoyed and play all the time, in case there are any other parents who would like to try this with their kids. We are having so much fun with this, so I highly recommend you give it a shot.

Let’s start simple and move on to the more complicated stuff…

Hisss is the game we play when our 3-year old insists on playing along. It’s a dead simple color and pattern matching game, but still a lot of fun.

Tsuro is a game we found and tried in the game room at the absolutely wonderful Game Masters exhibition at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. It’s quick to set up and easy to play, but it lays a good foundation for thinking ahead and considering how actions that affect you might affect others as well.

Taxi Wildlife is fun because it’s a very tactile game. The core gameplay requires you to stick your hand in a bag and feel around for the shapes of different animals. It’s a great way to learn about the importance of different senses.

Lanterns is where things start to get serious (i.e. really fun for adults). It’s a game that combines a simple pattern matching mechanic with building up enough resources to “buy” the points you need to win the game. We’re spending a lot of time with this one at the moment.

Lotus is made by the same studio as Lanterns, and it’s just as fun and beautiful. The artwork really is spectacular on this one. I’m not exaggerating when I say that as you build these flowers, it feels like the table you’re playing on is starting to bloom. The rules are less complicated than Lanterns, and it’s a fairly quick game, so it’s a great way to calm the kids down before dinner…

King of Tokyo is probably our favorite right now. We tried this out at the unbelievable Guardian Games store here in Portland. When we started I was nervous—the game takes a little while to learn. But once you get it, it goes fast and it’s a lot of fun. I think my daughter loves it because of all the decisions that are required. You roll 6 dice on a turn, and then you have to decide which to keep and which to “reroll” (you get 2 rerolls per turn). The game might seem cartoony, but don’t be fooled—this is a serious game that’s somehow still enjoyable by all ages.

Well, I guess no game overview would be complete without Ticket to Ride. My daughter is obsessed with this one. In addition to the fun and tactile gameplay, it also teaches strategy in a simple way (I’ve already been able to use the phrase “play the long game” in multiple parenting situations…). I haven’t gotten any of the expansions yet, but I hear the 1910 expansion in particular is a very good one.

And finally, we get to Splendor. Ah, what to say about Splendor. This game was a gift from Rich Mulholland, who came to stay with us for a couple of days on a trip to Portland a few months back. Rich is an obsessed board game geek, and he could see I was a curious newbie, having never played anything beyond Monopoly. So of course he took me under his wing. He taught my wife and I how to play Splendor, and then I took it around to a bunch of friends and got them addicted as well. For a while my daughter asked me to show her how to play it, but I held back, not wanting her to get frustrated—this is a pretty complicated game that I thought wasn’t really suitable for kids.

Well, what do you know. She got it on the first try, and beat me in the second round. It was very hard for me to not just go lie down and sulk for the rest of the day. Being caught between pride in my daughter and embarrassment in my own skills is not a good look on me.

So those are the games we’ve tried and liked. I wanted to pass them on to you, just as Rich passed his favorites on to us and started what I’m sure will be a life-long connection between my daughters and I. Thank you, Rich. What a wonderful thing, to gift someone with a new passion.

I get these weird obsessions sometimes—a thing that starts small in my head until it becomes all-consuming for weeks on end. Maybe you can relate? Anyway, my current obsession is centered around jazz, and how much we can learn from it about technology, how we listen to music, and yes, even design.

If you follow me on Twitter you’ll know that I just finished reading How to Listen to Jazz, a book I thoroughly enjoyed. I shared screen shots of some of my favorite sections from the book here, but suffice to say it is about so much more than jazz, and I highly recommend it not just for music lovers, but for anyone who works in a creative role.

Right on cue, as so often happens on the internet, I came across Ken Norton’s excellent post Please Make Yourself Uncomfortable, about some of the leadership lessons we can learn from great jazz records (especially the all-time best one, Kind of Blue):

Miles, Ella, and Duke were adept at guiding their bands into the optimal anxiety zone, making them restless and opening up a space where they could create masterpieces. Such talent is also needed in product management. So much of what we’ve learned, our instincts, are to do the complete opposite. We’re told to minimize risk, communicate a clear plan, and document every step. As product managers, our most important job is to help our teams find the place of optimal discomfort—the goldilocks zone of ambiguity and uncertainty.

The same day I read Gretta Harley’s The Slow Listening Revolution, about why she still has a vinyl collection:

Why vinyl? Commitment. In this mid-second decade of the 21st century, music is being taken for granted on a collective scale. An entire generation of music listeners will never pay for music, nor do they believe that they should. The long form music medium has taken a back seat to song culture, yet the average person only listens to a song for approximately 24 seconds before deciding if it’s worth their time to continue to listen. I ponder the substantive value of something that our capitalistic, corporate-model culture places on “free.” When we can listen to a whole song, or usually only 24 seconds of a song without paying for it, do we really value the music? I wonder if we listeners are as committed to music as we were pre-internet? I really like the internet, so these words are in no way a complaint or indictment, but merely observation.

All of this—jazz, new music, old habits—came together as I picked up Dire Straits’s 1985 CD Brothers In Arms, which in some versions had this cover:

It used to be that proclaiming “A FULL DIGITAL RECORDING” was a selling point. Now, the first thing I look for when I buy an album is the phrase Mastered from the original master tapes, a sure sign of its 100% no-digital, analog-only experience.

Or, wait, maybe we’re just being anti-technology in our criticisms of digital music? There has always been a reluctance to adopt new things—a longing for the past and how things used to be. Clive Thompson gives us another example of this historical skepticism in That cursed newfangled technology, “electric lights”:

Robert Louis Stevenson penned “A Plea for Gas Lamps” in 1878, hoping to dissuade London’s authorities from installing obnoxious electric streetlamps like those in Paris. “A new sort of urban star now shines at night,” he wrote, “horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!”

So I don’t think we’ll solve this particular “which one is better” musical argument any time soon. But if history teaches us anything, it’s that it’s not a new argument, so we should just roll with it. And rock with it1.

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1. Sorry, that’s a really bad joke. I’ll see myself out. ↩

Jennifer Kahn’s The Happiness Code, an article about bringing rationality to self-improvement, is interesting in and of itself. But it’s Hannah Whitaker’s photo illustrations with lettering by Luke Lucas that really drew me in. I’m sure many of you despise pithy “wisdom quotes” as much as I do. So these are like smooth balm to a tortured soul.

You can see more of Hannah’s excellent work here. Luke’s personal website with some his great graphic design projects is here.