Is Angband healthy for 6-year olds?

[HallucinationMushroom]

I like watching my daughter play nethack. She started at 3 and is now 7. That grabbed her a lot more because I play tiles with nethack, has mouse move, and almost always provides some kind of 'story', even within the limited 2-5 levels she manages. I would just prop her on my lap when I played, and when she reached a certain point that she could hit the buttons I just let her play. I mean, if your son is gravitating towards roguelikes, why not? Shit, that's the dream, isn't it?

My daughter is much more of a Minecraft player, and is a whiz at that. I picked up Hack-Slash for us to play over X-Mas break... it is some kind of DoubleFine game mish-mash of legend of zelda and programming? Or so I was told.

[Derakon]

My daughter is much more of a Minecraft player, and is a whiz at that. I picked up Hack-Slash for us to play over X-Mas break... it is some kind of DoubleFine game mish-mash of legend of zelda and programming? Or so I was told.

Hack and Slash is much more of a programming game that uses a Zelda-like perspective; there's basically no Zelda-style gaming in it. I still enjoyed it though. The basic conceit is that when you hit an enemy (or any other active object in the game), instead of damaging them, you get to modify their source code and/or tweak the variables that represent them. This works into the puzzles, so e.g. there's a gate that demands a password which you cannot possibly determine from outside means, but if you hack the gate, you can look into its code to find what text string it's expecting, and thus learn what the password is (and you can change the password to "lol butts" or whatever if it strikes your fancy).

I'm already a programmer, so I found the game very easy to get into; I'm curious how other people who have less experience will fare.

[HallucinationMushroom]

Cool, I'll let you know how it goes! The wife wanted her to have some kind of programming exposure and I recall reading about the game from RPS, so maybe it will give her some good entry level exposure to coding. Lord knows I know nothing about it!

[MadeOfBees]

I started playing moria around the same age back in the 80s. It was a very positive experience for me overall. It taught me to learn to strategize, learn to prioritize things (be it spells, loot, etc.) After a year or two of playing, I started screwing around with wizard mode, which lead to me wondering why numbers had letters in them, which led me to learning how to code.

I could already read at the time, but it definately improved my reading, since there are a lot of words your average kid would not encounter, and since they dont really explain them, I learned how to intuit a words meaning from its context.

Id say let them have at it, theres nothing really offensive or inappropriate for a kid in there.

[MattB]

My son started playing Angband when he was 6. By the time he was 7 he felt confident enough to enter a Vanilla competion and, largely unsupervised by me, got to dlvl23:

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=16026

He cried for an hour when he died, but I thought it was good to be upset at that (if you see what I mean).

Even now, at the age of 9, he occasionally puts down Grand Theft Auto, or whatever, (I know, but a couple of his friends play it...) and rolls up a character. He's currently got a warrior at statgain - a new depth record for him - and he's starting to get nervous!

It's a great game for kids, IMHO. It teaches reading and typing. You're using a keyboard not a console controller, after all. Permadeath is an important life lesson. You need concentration and imagination - both in spades. What's not to love?

It's also got him interested in programming. God help us!
(He's getting a Raspberry Pi for Christmas from his Nanny.)
I hope he's not reading this...

[Wanderlust]

Well The Hobbit is a HUGE hit with my son. And this is the first time I've read a book to him without "dumbing down" the vocabulary to his level ... I just couldn't do that to Tolkein.

Even with that, he actually begs me to read just a bit more every night. The same long descriptive passages and detailed imagery that really challenged me to not get bored when I read this for the first time, are completely captivating to him. Plus of course the main character is small like a kid and the whole "steal the dragon's gold" quest is just classic.

Even better, he's loving Angband and he's actually doing quite well. Right now he's cruising DL20 with a level 15 hobbit rogue. He totally understands (and loves) stealth, and when he finds great items he jumps up with his hands in the air. He's still talking about how great it was to find Elvagil on DL12.

Of course, this is the first character we rolled just for him, with him making all the big decisions, and him manning the keyboard most of the time. So he hasn't died yet ... we'll see how that part goes ...

[tprice]

Good news all around Wanderlust!

[Wanderlust]

Well at this point I no longer have any doubt about the original question. Mark's first character died and he was not happy. But then he saw how the hall of fame works and saves all his character data so he can surpass it next time around. And right away he decided to start a new character, who he decided would be a half-troll mage. (He loves both magic and regeneration.)

Unfortunately Mark II died on DL2. He was swarmed by 5 low-level monsters plus Fang. After the death, Mark figured out exactly what had happened ... a shrieker mushroom several rooms earlier. Love it that he figured that out.

He started a new half-troll mage right away and we had one of the most exciting gaming sessions ever on DL2 as a pesky soldier chased him all around the level. He used up every phase door and CLW he had and escaped by the nick of his teeth with a kobold blocking the escape stairway by checking the monster memory to figure out that the kobold could kill him in 1 hit when he was down to 8 HP, but not when he had 9. That knowledge allowed him to plan precisely and with a little luck, he survived the encounter (even though 10 wolves were waiting on the other side of that staircase).

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=18536

One of the "keys" to making the game enjoyable for him is setting up keymaps so he can use his spells, rest to full health + SP, and other common game actions. I have a laptop so it's really challenging to deal with the keys. Today I'm going shopping to buy a new keyboard with a nice row of function keys at the top

[Raccoon]

I'm truly amazed by these stories. I've known kids that I try to read them stories, or show them how to play even simple games like Pokemon, and they get frustrated and angry because they don't want to deal with the challenge at all.

You either lucked out or are a hell of a parent to have a kid that wants to throw everything he has into learning and overcoming.

[krazyhades]

Wanderlust, that's really cool and heartwarmingly sweet to envision as well. Good luck to...well, probably best not best to call him minilust...but good luck to your son and happy delving!

edit: oh, Mark. That's his actual name, not just his dude. I was thinking "Mk. 1" meaning first character. Okay, good luck to Mark, then.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Really a great account and I look forward to reading more of Mark's adventures.

Half Troll-Mage isn't the easiest combination to learn with though. It takes them a very long time before magic is viable. Half Troll-Warrior is probably the go-to combination that should get Mark at least into the mid-game. High-elf-Mage, Dwarf-Priest, Dunadan-Ranger, Hobbit-Rogue, are a few other more standard combinations that should give good learning experience while still being robust for survival.

[Wanderlust]

Yes, half-troll warrior is proving to be amazing fun and also much better for learning.

Here's Mark's current character: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=18540

To facilitate play, we've been taping icons to the keyboard to give single-key access to ranged combat and all magic. We make little icons from paper and tape them to the keyboard. Like this Mark has direct control and this seems to make his thinking process much more careful and deeper.

We're looking forward to trying all the other suggested starting combos too (not just Mark).

[Wanderlust]

Mark and I have been playing a couple short (i.e., half-hourish) Angband sessions each day. This is actually the perfect game for allowing a kid to play, but keeping limits on it. Even 5 minutes can be enough for a satisfying session sometimes.

He had a phenomenal run with his first half-troll warrior: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=18540

But this morning it happened ... 1550' deep in the dungeon, before kindergarten. A swarm of earth hounds with a couple ghasts and ghouls mixed in. He was out of arrows at the time so he was tending toward melee.

"Uh oh ... be careful of those things! They can paralyze you which means you might die instantly!"

"No, Daddy, just look! They're easy to kill!"

"Argh! That's dangerous. Run away!"

"But it's so much fun to kill them ..."

He didn't understand what had happened until I went into the messages log and showed him where the ghast paralyzed him. After that it looked like he got attacked a hundred times or more (we didn't count). When he saw that he understood everything.

He cried after ... but by the time he went to kindergarten he was already dreaming of how he'll get even deeper next time.

My next project is to try to make Angband more accessible for him. I have a keyboard on order that will hopefully arrive today. I intend to use autoinscriptions/keymaps extensively along with icons glued onto the keys to give him single-key, no-reading-required access to all the functions needed to play the game ... at least the tactical parts like eating, resting, fighting, quaffing potions, reading scrolls, using wands/rods/staves, etc. He'll still need my help for inventory management and to read monster and item descriptions, but he'll be in full control, which will help him learn.

Half-troll warrior was a blast for him to play because of the simplicity and the dramatic power curve. Regeneration is really fun too. But he watched me playing a half-elf mage the other day and he was amazed how different the play is. Wonder what class he'll choose next.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Great he did so well going deeper. Death to lack of free action...can happen to everyone at some point or another. http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=17085 Died to a Gorgimera. The bad part was, my @ had a ring of Free Action, but just didn't wear it!

[Bowman]

The bad part was, my @ had a ring of Free Action, but just didn't wear it!

I've had that happen too, because I took off my ring of free action to recharge a ring of digging while I was sorting through treasure in (what I thought was) a cleared vault. Unfortunately, I didn't notice the trapper until it was too late

Great to hear about how well it's been going with your son! Getting to dl31 as quickly as he has is a good accomplishment.