The eternal question: how do I get my child into games? Specifically, miniatures games, board games and anything of that variety.

My personal journey getting my now 3-year-old into the hobby was actually relatively straightforward. At its most basic, the answer is to do something, and your child will likely want to copy you. However, I did nudge the process along a few times.

Start Small

And by small, I don’t mean 10mm WW2 models. I mean something simple. For me, it was Snap. My daughter got a deck of farm animal snap cards for Christmas when she was 2. She liked shouting the word snap, enjoyed making animal noises, and loved having a stack of cards that were ‘hers’. It didn’t really matter that she barely understood what was happening at first; we could sit down on the floor or at her tiny table and flip cards for 10, 15, 20 minutes at a time. This opened the door for more to come.

Simple Board Games

The next step was some really simple board games. For us, it was an Orchard Games board game about penguins collecting coloured fish. You flip over some tokens, and if they are your colour or a rainbow, then they go on your iceberg, and once you fill it up, you win. It might seem really basic, and it is, but it helps to teach turn-taking, item collection, how to set up a game and learn a few extra rules, colours, and so much more. The point is at 2; she loved it and still plays it nearly a year later. Is it fun for adults? Not particularly, but this is a journey, and step 3 is where it gets good.

Painting Models

Now, I’m not sure of the order on this, so I may have started her painting before the penguin game. Either way, give the kid a paintbrush, some models you don’t care about and a paint palette. Put some of the paint onto the palette for them and just let them crack on. That’s what I did, and she loves it. So far, she’s painted the following:

• A Pink Horror (although she didn’t paint it pink)
• Several Lord of the Rings MESBG horses and riders
• Some skaven
• A Stormcast wizard on a griffcharger (that’s probably the wrong name)

And her current project is a cool dragon from Primal: The Awakening. Anything that you are bothered, just re-prime them and you can paint it yourself in your own time. But she has a blast, and we normally paint together for a good 30-60 minutes each week. This doubles up and means you get hobby time as well, win-win.

Baby’s First Miniatures Game

And it’s time. The first miniatures gaming experience. Our first game was not a game. Instead, we made a farm with all the animal miniatures I had and played a game of herding some dogs into a chosen area.

So temper your expectations for that first game. It’s more about moving things around and adapting the play to whatever works best. Don’t have lots of animals, make it about a load of soldiers walking through a city to collect something. Just focus on picking up and moving the models. After a while, I introduced dice, but only on the surface. We rolled and moved something, but the number didn’t mean anything.

Dice Are Tricky

So dice are actually pretty tricky. When they are young, they either don’t know their numbers very well or can’t immediately understand that 3 pips is a 3 and that means something. My advice is, if you have custom dice, use those, or only roll a small number and teach the numerals slowly. Once again, temper your expectations. Until very recently, I’ve used the Marvel Crisis Protocol custom dice with symbols on or flipped cards off a deck to represent numbers for winning or losing at something.

This is one of the key reasons I came up with Throwing Hands, as there are no dice (it uses rock, paper, scissors). Our daughter learnt some basic sign language at a young age and picked up rock, paper, scissors really easily. I have since added some complexity for adults and older kids, but the simplified rules are tested and approved by a 3-year-old.

Picking Something They Like

I’m just going to say it, no child is born with a love of Napoleonic charges or Greek Phalanxes. They don’t know what they are and don’t necessarily care. There will be a time for that, but their early gaming experience (especially if they are quite young) should be aimed at something they like – in my earlier example, a farm or Bluey. However, my daughter also loves the TV show Spidey and Friends and has since gotten interested in all things Marvel. Enter Marvel Crisis Protocol as an easy stepping stone. This has gone a long way towards getting her into games.

Learning Experiences

When we play Marvel Crisis Protocol, we don’t really play the actual game. Have you seen the profiles, cards and rulebook? Got to remember that she’s only 3 – is something I tell myself all the time with this stuff. So we play an approximation of the game. We lay out some terrain, pick a team of heroes and villains and usually I focus the game around using the measuring tools and collecting some sort of resource. Characters can also roll a single die, and if it gets a damage symbol, they can knock over another character, and similarly, this can be blocked with a shield.

All of this is done with the aim of slowly learning all the necessary elements of playing any game, taking turns, rolling dice, moving pieces, and developing basic strategies for victory. Just getting everything out and setting it up is all part of the learning experience.

What’s Next?

I recently picked up CoraQuest, which is a dungeon crawler game designed for a younger audience. Technically, it says 6+ (I think), but I think it will likely work fine even if it needs some adapting. If not, it goes in the cupboard for another more suitable time. We’ll also continue to play her age-specific games whenever she wants as well.

Other than that, I think I’ll start introducing proper dice more and more to our little games, and she is excited to start getting the models she painted out of her box for a game of something.

For any parents who want to get their kids into tabletop games of any description, my main advice is to start small and use whatever already interests them as the initial hook. Even if it isn’t an amazing first experience, look to the future, and as I’ve said several times, temper your expectations.

Drop a comment below on what games you’ve used to get your kids into games or anything else you’ve done to get them into the hobby.