Yesterday I started making a game with my daughter. She’s three years and nine months old. The game, therefore was very simple — the multi-coloured people are running away from the white ghosts. Each person has a die of the same colour, and that determines how far they move. The ghosts all move the same number of squares, although they can move either clockwise or anti-clockwise. She controlled all the people, and I controlled the ghosts.

The fact that it wasn’t a particularly good game didn’t matter. The point of the exercise was making it. She loved telling me how many rooms to draw and where, she loved rolling the dice, and she loved moving the people. She even kept score (despite the fact that there wasn’t actually any score to keep). A successful game!