Back in January, we looked at Handipoints and decided it was a bummer it was aimed at younger children since, well, all out kids are teens. And then last week on the delicious popular list another game based on chores hit my radar.

The lines between our first lives and virtual lives continue to be blurred. Enter Chore Wars which allows family members to earn experience points (XP) completing chores.

Instead of simply rolling dice, the character creation process involves optionally choosing different “natural talents” like paying bills, making phone calls, decorating, grocery shopping and more.

Since adding a pool, the need to skim and clean it has become my chore. Mowing the lawn is a chore that also needs to be assigned. I decided to add these two chores.

Adding adventures (chores)
The recommended amount of XP to award for chores is using the amount of minutes it takes to complete the chore with a maximum of 100 XP. Since mowing our full lawn takes about 60 minutes, I assigned 60 XP to that task. Usually the kids split up the lawn, so I also created an adventure called “mow half lawn” (with half the XP) as well as “weed eat full lawn.”

Next you must choose the relevant stats required for the chore: strength, constitution, intelligence, dexterity, charisma, intelligence and wisdom as it relates to the chore. For mowing the lawn I chose: medium strength, medium constitution, low dexterity, no charisma, low intelligence and no wisdom.

After that it’s time to optionally choose an amount of gold pieces to optionally award during the adventure. If you make the range 0 and 0 then no gold will be awarded. I decided to choose the range 10-20 GP for mowing the full lawn. leaving half that 1-10 for mowing half the lawn.

Treasure can optionally be won by completing an adventure and slaying the monster (if there is one) and you can assign a percentage to how often the monster will have treasure. I used 10% for mowing the full lawn and 5% for mowing half the lawn. This means there is a greater chance of the kids earning a surprise gift after completing the chore if they mow the whole lawn by themselves versus half the lawn. 1:10 chance of possibly earning say a new Xbox 360 game seems like a pretty good deal.

Finally, you select the percentage chance of a monster encounter and whether or not any gold will be awarded for completing the chore. I chose a higher percentage chance of a monster encounter for mowing only half the lawn versus mowing the full lawn which makes it more perilous to our brave adventurers for mowing only half the lawn. Players (family members) earn XP by completing chores and logging their activity. Perhaps it is my GM days with D&D that had me enjoying the process of choosing different monster encounters while mowing the lawn like mosquitoes, snakes and bees.

But does it work actually getting more chores done with less friction?
Our teens seem somewhat interested in Chore Wars. I’ll have to blog back with an update of whether or not it’s actually making them more responsive and helpful with their chores around the house, but we’re giving it a try.

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