Running with the Pokeball

As a gamer dad, it’s my sworn duty to encourage the next generation to pick up the dice and follow in my tabletop gaming footsteps. (I’d encourage them to play some video games too, but all the encouragement they need for that is a power switch in the “on” position, so I think we’ve got that covered.)

Last year, I saw that my my eldest daughter, Thing One, was poking around at Pokemon. Her friends were playing. She had watched a few episodes of the TV show. She knew the names of a handful of critters beyond Pikachu and… um… that one fiery guy. You know. The lizard.

“Excellent,” I said myself in my best Mr. Burns voice. “First Pokemon. Then Magic: the Gathering. And from there, it’s a short slide down the slippery slope to Pathfinder, Axis and Allies, or Call of Cthulhu.”

I stifled an evil laugh as I sprang to the Internet to order a bulk pack of random, but playable, Pokemon cards.

That was a mistake.

I’ve since learned that, like most kids, Thing One liked the idea of Pokemon, but had no idea how to play the game. Even the kids who were “playing the game” didn’t know how to actually play the game: they just picked some number on the cards to compare, and turned it into “war” with cute Japanese critters. (“My Turtleduck has 80 hp, which is more than your Squisheedog’s 50 hp, so I win!”)

A year later, most of those cards have wandered off into the elementary school plaything ecosystem, traded away for Silly Bands, erasers, heroin, or whatever the fad is this week.

This Christmas, I decided, things would be different. This Christmas, Thing Two is old enough to be interested in Pokemon too. And this Christmas, rather a hundred random cards, I picked up and wrapped a two-player starter set.

With rules. And instructions on how to actually play the game.

Several days and several games later, it’s going rather well. I taught Thing One to play while her sister was visiting some friends, so it was just the two of us. We used the walk-through that came with the starter set (“Don’t shuffle the decks! Draw the cards when the instructions tell you to!”) which, while slow and dry, did a good job of introducing each concept and card-type in small, bite-sized chunks. By the time we finished, we were quite bored, but definitely knew how to play the game.

When Thing Two got home, her sister taught her how to play, with me standing by to help just in case. Since then, I’ve played two more games with Thing Two, and she’s suggested we do a round-robin tournament between the three of us, scoring points for each win. “I can use my whiteboard to track the points,” she said. She’s very big on tracking points.

So far, so good. But I don’t think they’re at the top of that slippery slope leading to the Magic: the Gathering pro tour just yet. To get there, they’ll need to be able to play by themselves. Christmas vacation won’t last forever; I won’t always be here to play the game with them.

But we’ve got until Monday to cross that hurdle. I think after this week’s tournament (with a booster-pack prize!) we can make it happen.