From the seas to the land–literally, as some of these are D-Day scenarios. I’ve put Memoir ’44 on the board with my 10 year old and we’ve been having a blast. For the uninitiated, this uses the Commands and Colors system where you draw cards from a deck and they allow you to control a set number of units in one of three sections on the board. That’s the gist, at least–the rest is relatively simple.

It’s not much to mention but I thought I’d highlight why I think it works so well as a father-son game. There’s a few reasons: historical education, ease of play, and ease of “Dad play.”

Historical education is obvious. It’s based on real world scenarios and makes for an excellent opportunity to discuss real world events. It’s given us a great opportunity to go over the highlights of America’s involvement in the late war.

Ease of play also comes in. He first learned this system two years ago at eight years old. Back then, we played without the special event cards and it worked fine. Now, we play with the full rules and he’s mostly keeping up, aside from some teaching moments. It’s an excellent chance to learn some of the conventions of tabletop board gaming and is well within his grasp. He’s won about half of our games, in fact.

Okay, so that leads to the third reason: ease of “Dad play.” That’s when you pull a punch to soften a defeat or essentially surrender the game. He’s still not at my level (I say, chest puffed up, a superior look in my eye) and sometimes it helps to hand him some success to build his confidence or ensure a reasonable tactic succeeds. The beauty of this system is he can’t see my cards. I can easily hold back the game winning play, or let him take a little more time to realize he needs to defend a village. I can do all of that without him being able to pick it out–I just had the wrong cards in hand, clearly!

If you have a young kid you’re trying to ease into wargaming, you could do far worse than Memoir ’44, but that’s not surprising. This has been the starting point for most kids for over a decade now for very good reason. It’s far from my favorite game in this general system but it’s a great way to get a kid started into the wonderful world of historical gaming.