A GAME OF DRAUGHTS WITH MY NEPHEW

I'm not going to go on about winning two games of chess the other day, I'm really not! It was a flukey lunchtime for me, and I didn't even learn the thing I'd hoped to learn about the value in losing.

In a neat reflection of the problem, I saw it in microcosm tonight when I played a game of draughts with my nephew. He's six years old and he fluctuates between the two binary settings of sweet and stroppy. Like a lot of children, he hasn't quite got the hang of losing. The idea of losing graciously is still a world away for him, just as the humiliation of losing at chess seems frustratingly distant from his uncle.

I was determined to do it properly.

"Pick a hand," I said, holding out two clenched fists. He tapped my knuckles and I unfurled my fingers to reveal a white plastic disc. "Right Ben, that means you're white."

"I don't wanna be white!" he remonstrated. Stroppy mode kicks in quickly.

"Well, that's how the game works. Alright, we'll say that white means you can choose. Which col.."

"Black,"

"OK, you're black. I'll be white. Now white goes first..."

"No! I wanna go first!" Arms crossed, lip out.

"That's not really the way you pl..." To save an argument that would have ended with me crawling under the sofa looking for scattered draught pieces and the draught board upside down on the carpet, I eventually did let him start this unusual game with an opening move from black.

It certainly is unusual. My Mum's not taught him about kings, so the aim of this variant is simply to get more pieces to the other end of the board than the other player. The rest of the rules are pretty much as you'd expect. You have to move diagonally, you can jump pieces to take them and you can't move backwards.

I am a firm believer in playing games properly and not allowing children to win on purpose. I don't think it does them any favours in the long run. However, in this instance, the draughts board might not have survived. Every time I took one of his pieces, he wailed and screamed that it wasn't fair. He wanted to change the rules, he wanted to put his fingers in the way, he wanted to bend every known law of physics he could, just so that he could be declared the winner.

Microcosm.

In the end, we ran out of moves with five of his pieces home compared to just two of mine. Sweet mode was suddenly back as stroppy mode switched off. The real victory though was that for the first time I can remember, he had grasped that he needed to really use his brain to think about what might happen as a consequence of his actions.

If I move that there, Uncle Matthew will take it. That's not good so I'll do something else.

And that I think, is a great lesson for life, right there. My next move has a consequence according to the rules of the game. We all learn this algorithm at some point, this critical analysis of future events. Call it Newton's laws of motion, call it the law of sowing and reaping or just plain old cause and effect. I was so proud of Ben, starting to get it through his tears.

He was happy he won though. Apparently he went home telling his Mum (my sister) that he 'won Uncle Matthew at giraffes'.

That'll do.