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My almost-5-year-old is loving Kids of Catan, and to be honest I've grown to like this game too, even with just two players. It's all about luck, but it's fast and a really good foundation for more advanced games.

What rule would allow young players of this game to begin to exercise more control over their chances of winning, given that they are experienced and comfortable with the core rules?

Has anyone had success in transitioning children from Kids of Catan to a more strategic game by adding house rules to KoC?

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I thought this was a good question - all you would probably need to do to make it "fit" would be to rephrase it to something like "How to modify Kids of Catan to improve the play experience for children?" A specific purpose for the improvements in other words, that creates the reasonable possibility of an objective right answer. I hope you haven't been discouraged - the "house style" for this site is something that confused everyone when we first arrived here! – thesunneversets Aug 23 '11 at 9:27
Continuing in the vein of "lets overwhelm the new guy" :) I offer this meta post which contains advice on how to word requests for house rules. – Pat Ludwig♦ Aug 23 '11 at 16:27
No worries folks, I understand what you mean. My rewrite ends with this question. Is it acceptable? "What rule would allow young players of this game to begin to exercise more control over their chances of winning, given that they are experienced and comfortable with the core rules?" I will post a new question without the word ideas in the title if that sounds good. – memetech Aug 24 '11 at 4:11
Sorry it took so long to revisit! I like your rewrite a lot and am editing it into the question and then reopening it. – Pat Ludwig♦ Sep 25 '12 at 18:01

1 Answer

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In this thread on BoardGameGeek there's a house rule that the players can choose which direction to rotate the board. In order to choose the direction, players should consider the resources they gain, as well as the resources their opponents gain (or lose).

Further down in the thread are several other suggestions for introducing more choice into how to rotate the board (e.g. roll two dice and pick one).

I also saw a suggestion that trading could be introduced to reduce the amount of luck, but I haven't seen any reports of whether that was successful or not.

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