In our 2018 book written with József Jesztl, we defined several developmental areas related to board gaming—one of them was: Seeking Challenges. Let’s revisit what we wrote back then and what levels we outlined in that category. Progress moves from the first to the sixth level:

“This is a crucial element, one that goes hand in hand with motivation. It's something we often see in children who’ve been playing for years. When embarking on a board game pedagogy project—especially when working with children who aren’t yet familiar with board games—engagement will be one of our most important pedagogical tasks for quite a while. Simply getting them to play at all. From there, we can move toward the point where ensuring a steady stream of challenges becomes our job, as it’s precisely this that begins to motivate the child—or the whole group—to venture into uncharted waters. Suddenly, games they used to avoid or reject start showing up on the table. They begin to actively seek out and create these new situations.

Here are the six levels of progression we described:

1. Plays only occasionally, does not actively seek out opportunities to play.

2. Plays a small number of familiar games repeatedly; those games tend to rely on similar mechanisms, and stepping outside of their comfort zone is unpleasant.

3. Enjoys games in which they do well, shows interest in new games too, but failure quickly leads to rejection.

4. Curious, yet still strongly attached to their preferences—particularly intimidated by games that seem difficult.

5. Motivated by new games, comes to expect a constant influx of fresh experiences; enjoys challenges and takes pride in overcoming more complex games.

6. Becomes proactive in game selection: searches, reads up, makes recommendations."

And why did this come to mind just now?

Because this is exactly where we’re at with my 8-year-old daughter. She already has a fairly wide range of board games she enjoys, but this doesn’t really hold true when it comes to abstract, two-player games—even though she likes them. We’ve probably played at least 150–200 games of Kalaha, and she also enjoys Backgammon. There was a time when Pylos was a favorite too, and she even gets along fine with International Checkers.

But with these types of games, she tends to shut down if things aren’t going well. She got the hang of Kalaha and plays it well, so she enjoys it. And that’s the thing—she’s afraid of learning something new and would rather stay in the familiar world of Kalaha. What bothers me about this is that it mirrors her approach to real life as well: She hesitates to start anything new because she’s afraid of the unknown, or of possibly failing.

The truth is, too many things come easily to her, so if something doesn’t work out right away, she lets it go. And that’s not a great attitude—probably no need to explain why. Not everything will come easily in life. So now we’re playing Bison. It’s not hard to convince her to play—she’s interested.She gets frustrated because she’s not winning, so she doesn’t ask to play it yet. But over time, that will change.

She trusts me enough to go along with it, even if not too often for now. Then one day it’ll click, she’ll start to enjoy it, and she’ll begin asking for it herself. And I truly believe that if we go through enough of these kinds of processes within the world of games, they’ll start to shape her decision-making in real life too. She’ll learn that there’s no reason to fear failure.

So yes—we’re out here chasing bisons with dedication.