My son sucks at Drop 7

I know it's bad form to brag and all, but I can totally kick my son Ripley's ass at Drop 7. Sure you could argue that he's only 10 months old, but then you'd just be trying to steal my glory. Jerk.

i like stuff

MORE: Gadgets • Games • guestblog • Kids

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

Godfree

I have a picture of my son in 2003, age 2, lying on the floor getting his diaper changed while he’s holding a SNES controller and playing Super Mario World. Now he’s graduated to Portal and Spore. *sniff* I’m so proud!
A.Lwin

“I know it’s bad form to brag and all, but I can totally kick my son Ripley’s ass at Drop 7. Sure you could argue that he’s only 10 months old, but then you’d just be trying to steal my glory. Jerk. ”

Wow just wow, to brag that you can beat your infant son in some electronic game and then call him a jerk. You must be proud as a parent and I’m sure he feels the same about you.
- r0b0
  
  @A.Lwin – no, he’s not calling his son a jerk, he’s calling you a jerk
  - pupdog
    
    And rightly so it seems…
- Halloween Jack
  
  …not the sharpest knife in the drawer, are we?
Xeni Jardin

Every time I see a photo of that kid (or hang out with him), I swear his fat little cheeks make me want to EAT HIS HEAD. He is so adorable i cannot stand it. Look at those eyelashes for cryin’ out loud!!!1111!
Anonymous

Yes, I agree. I remember when my children were toddlers, I used to make them laugh and giggle by picking them up and announcing “I EAT babies!”

The cat would stare at us, a look of quiet alarm on her face, but my kids and me knew I was just kidding.
irksome

You must be very proud.

Me, the last time I played Checkers, a friends 4-yr old kicked my butt. At one point he looked at me and said “You’re toast.”
Anonymous

I’m 32 and even I can’t understand how to play Drop7 and I’ve been playing it for 3 days now. The instructions, they do nothing.

I just drop random numbers and hope for the best.
arikol

What a cutie

My 3 yr old loves Angry Birds, loves the iPod function (selects his favourite songs) and can call his mother on my iPhone recognises the pattern of her name, been learning the letters).

Just think about it. Depending on your age you may have seen a PC after you started school (an 8MHz beast running DOS), If you’re around 30-35 then you may have used a GUI as late as 10 or 12 years old. These kids are controlling these futuristic devices before they can walk. It just blows my mind. The future is arriving now, one bit at a time…
- Anonymous
  
  To be fair to old folks, computers are a lot easier to work with these days. If you are on a Mac or Linux box, type “ed” in a terminal and see how long it takes to figure out. (You should try it yourself first).
tarabrown

@arikol I keep thinking about this 2.5 year old playing the iPad better than I can. These kids brains are just going to be wired differently and its going to be revolutionary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT4EbM7dCMs
- MS
  
  The IPad is the best kid’s computer that I have ever seen… My 3 1/2 year old son has about 20 games on it (all a couple bucks each) and streams netflix Dora…
Anonymous

Enjoy it while it lasts! :)
- CH
  
  Heh… I was going to post exactly the same thing!
  
  Yea, enjoy while it lasts. My daughter started to kick my butt around the age of 4, and I have been a gamer since I got a Pong box in the early 80′s. This mommy is sooo proud of my little gamer, but pro tip: don’t mention it too much to their teachers, they tend to freak out.
  - IronEdithKidd
    
    I wouldn’t mention it to other parents, either. Oh, the wide-eyed look of horror I got for mentioning that my toddler figured out how to use the Wii nunchuck when he was about 15 months old.
    
    Honestly, I really can’t wait until after tax season so we can get Kinect. Our son is *so* going to love the dancing games!
fatuousplatitudes

@arikol Some of us (yawn, yawn) never saw a PC until we were well in middle age.
My first computer was time on the University’s mainframe – punchcards and a week’s delay for the reply – and we were doing “computer-aided design”… No wonder I failed my architecture degree.
Twenty-five years ago I remember frightening my niece with my Amiga (scorn) so what HER children are now capable of doing would frighten me if I, for one, didn’t welcome our 10-month-old overlords.
- mdh
  
  well played.
Anonymous

Personally I had an Acorn in the first few years of school, or possibly Windows 3.1 at home. Early 90s child.
Grrrrrrrr8

I really wanted to enjoy drop7. I found the regular mode to be too tedious. Hardcore was more fun, but still not quite satisfying. I took it off my phone after a couple days.

I think that what the game truly lacks is the feeling that you can get yourself out of a jam. But that doesn’t happen so often. You get a build-up of gray that just overwhelms you. If there’s any surprise to be found in the gray pile below it clears out maybe one more spot than you expected. I understand that the skill is in avoiding the gray mountains, but without that extra excitement I just got bored setting up chains.

Ah well, glad your kid’s having fun with it.
Anonymous

There’s going to be some kind of Human Moore’s Law thing we are gonna realize soon.
Anonymous

Ripley must be sooooooo embarrassed!
andyhavens

Oh, yeah? Well your kid’s dad could totally kick my kid’s dad at it!
Anonymous

rather:
“Drop 7 sucks!” my son would probably say.
positive reinforcement goes a long way
Anonymous

How do you keep Ripley from constantly pressing the home button?
Anonymous

A) Kids also love Thicket. Seriously, check it out.

B) I got on the Drop7 daily leaderboard twice at #1 and did a writeup on my blog about how (http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-to-win-at-drop7.html). I was getting in the top 100 every single day for months and months. I was a bit obsessed. I also wrote a Drop7 clone in Ruby (http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/08/lattice-drop7-clone-in-ruby.html) and did a bunch of research on Drop7; it started out as Chain Factor (chainfactor.com), which was actually set up as part of an alternate reality game to promote the CBS TV show Numb3rs. I didn’t go so far as to watch Numb3rs, tho, which seems to be a bad sign for the marketing usefulness of alternate reality games.