Teaching Theo to Lose at Faraway

Theo is seven and has exactly one gear when he loses at something, and that gear is loud. I should say up front, my wife and I have talked about this, we’re not worried about it, seven year olds are supposed to be bad losers some percentage of the time and he’s genuinely a sweetheart otherwise. But I did not expect Faraway of all things to be the game that finally forced the conversation.

He’d watched me play it a couple times while I was working out what I thought for the review and got interested in the little mushroom artwork, which, fair, the art is genuinely striking, I said that in the review and I meant it. So we played a real game, Sunday afternoon, the two of us, his mom reading on the couch nearby half paying attention. I explained the twist as gently as I could, that you build your row left to right but score it right to left, and he nodded like he got it, and then spent his whole first game building exactly the way you’d naturally want to, front-loading his best plays early, back-loading the risky stuff.

You can guess what happened. His early cards, the ones he was proudest of, scored basically nothing, because they were sitting at the tail end of the reveal order with the least context behind them. His last couple of cards, thrown down almost as an afterthought, ended up carrying the game. He did not find this satisfying the way I find it satisfying. He found it, in his exact words, “not fair, because I did it right and it still lost.”

That’s actually the whole design though, and I tried to explain it that way, that the game is asking you to think backwards on purpose, that “doing it right” by normal instincts is the trap the whole thing is built around. He was not in a place to hear game design theory at that particular moment. There was some yelling. There was a card thrown, not hard, more of a frustrated flick, but enough that we called the game there.

We tried again the next Sunday. Second time through he remembered the twist going in, deliberately held back his strong plays for later in the row, and actually pulled ahead of me for a few rounds before I caught up. He still lost that game too, by a little, and this time he just said “again” and reset the cards himself. That’s the actual teaching moment I think, not the first loss, the second one, where the mechanic stopped being a trick played on him and became a puzzle he was actually solving.

I don’t have a tidy lesson here about parenting, I’m not qualified to give one. I just think it’s worth saying that the review version of me, the one grading the twist as clever design, and the dad version of me, watching a seven year old process an unfair-feeling loss in real time, are not always experiencing the same game. Faraway earned its four stars fair and square. It also made my kid cry a little on a Sunday, and both of those things are true.