Potato Pirates card game mixes strategy and coding skills

Try as I might, I can’t get my 10 year-old son to eat any form of potatoes. Perhaps he’ll be more amenable to the idea of programming with them. Especially if they’re pirates.

Meet Potato Pirates, a new physical card game that’s been created by a company in Singapore called Codomo. Aimed at children aged six and up, it blends “potatoes, programming and piracy” in a game that promises to deliver “10 hours worth of programming concepts in 30 minutes”.

Played by 3–6 players at a time, the game itself involves racing to collect seven ‘Potato King’ cards by “roasting, mashing and frying other potato pirates” while making your attacks more powerful by using coding concepts like loops and conditionals.

Codomo says the game has been developed from two years of working with children in workshops and camps, figuring out how to create something fun and social which still manages to teach the programming skills (or at least ways of thinking) that will be useful elsewhere.

It has the makings of an excellent family game, which in turn could help parents who don’t feel that confident about the programming that their children are learning at school.

Codomo is raising money to produce the first run of Potato Pirates on crowdfunding website Kickstarter, and has already more-than-doubled its goal with a month to go until the campaign ends.

The minimum pledge if you want a copy of the game is 30 Singapore dollars (which is just under £17 here in the UK, although the S$10 postage brings that up to more like £23). Find out more on the Kickstarter page.