Heroquest as an introduction to RPG

For the holidays we had planned to go camping with the 2 older kids (6 and 8 y.o.). Unfortunately weather forecasts were not good enough to bring the game along. All the more most of it was recreated with cardboard...

When the children asked to play heroquest I had the idea we could play it without the board.
So we wrote the character sheets on paper and played it like we would in a normal Rpg.
The dice were rolled thanks to my Dice For Heroquest application.

Dungeons were of course shorter but I could introduce some role-playing elements like free actions, talking...

And it worked! They even found it better to play. Heroquest turned out to be a very good introduction to rpg!

Children's attention span

Now that I have played dozens of games with the children I have gathered a little experience on how to handle a game with them. One of the most important aspect to take into account is their attention span ability.

Just to set up the background, let me remind you that, most of the time I play with children aged between 4 and 8. 

The last 4 games we played on the same quest : Four Kingdoms. The advantage of this quest is that it can easily be divided into four main parts : one for each kingdom or quarter of the map. This was key because each part took us around one hour.

What came out of it is that a 4-year-old child will stay focused on the game for around 20 minutes. Then he will start leaving the table between his turns and play something else. Should he find another center of interest he will eventually give up playing. With a 6-year-old child it can last up to 30 minutes before the focus is lost.
Finally the eldest one, who is also the most motivated by Heroquest, can easily play for an hour without interruption.

Could anyone confirm these results ? Do you have any tips to play longer with children ?
Please let me know in the comments.

Heroquest for children

After a dozen games played with four small kids (between 4 and 8), I can draw up a first report on the subject.

First of all, depending on the child it might be tricky to make him like this game. Therefore the quests have to be easy and rewarding. I like to have them keep their heroes alive from one quest to another and gather treasures and equipments.

In this purpose, my initiation campaign (Escape the dungeon) reached its goal. Easy quests to learn the basics and earn some rewards useful for the next adventures. On the other hand, the standard quests are still too difficult for them. That's why I'm mainly using my own quests (such as "Chaos den").

Concerning heroes, the more difficult to play are spell throwers. To use them efficiently they need first to be able to read, but also tu build strategies. This might be quite difficult for them now. Thus, I'm planning to create another initiation campaign dedicated to magicians where they would have to solve problems thanks to a wise use of spells.

Another funny point is that they like to use the Heroquest Dice application on mobile phone. They really find it fun...

Finally, the games need to be quite short (1 hour max) because it is hard for young children to focus for a long time.

To be continued...