Denny’s daughter Ruthie is eight and has decided, on her own, that she wants to learn the games her dad talks about at work. Denny mentioned this to me a few months back half as a joke, she keeps asking why I always come home talking about a guy named Garrett and airplanes and dice, and somehow that turned into me spending a Saturday afternoon at their kitchen table trying to teach an eight-year-old a cooperative two-player flight simulator that I usually only play with adults who already understand the concept of a shared failure state.
Sky Team was probably the wrong first choice, in hindsight. The whole mechanic depends on placing your dice without discussing your plan out loud, reading your partner’s intentions from where the pieces land instead of what they say, and Ruthie is, understandably for an eight-year-old, extremely bad at not talking through every single decision in real time. We crashed the plane twice in our first session. Actually crashed it, not a near miss, a real hard landing that ended the flight. She took it about as well as you’d expect, which is to say not well at all, arms crossed, declaring the game stupid and unfair before storming off toward the living room.
What got her to come back to the table, and this is the part I actually wanted to write down, was Denny sitting her back down and telling her the exact thing I’d told him once, that losing at something you’re new to isn’t information about whether you’re good at it, it’s just information about what to try differently next time. I don’t know if that’s originally his line or something he heard from somebody else, but hearing an eight-year-old repeat it back a week later, mostly correctly, more or less unprompted, was one of the better moments I’ve had at that kitchen table.
We’ve flown four flights since, crashed once more, and landed the rest, and she’s gotten genuinely sharp at reading what my dice placement means without me saying a word, which is the whole point of the game working the way it’s designed to. I don’t have kids of my own and I wasn’t sure going in whether I’d be any good at teaching one, patience isn’t always my strongest instrument, ask anyone who’s watched me argue with a rulebook. But there’s something different about teaching a kid who genuinely wants to get better at something versus teaching an adult who’s half paying attention. Ruthie pays full attention. It’s made me a better teacher of the game, honestly, having to slow down and actually explain the why instead of assuming everyone already gets it.