Ezra has a game he likes to play with us that goes like this: his rocket is out of control! Everything is going wrong! What should we do?

I ask him to describe the problem: all the blasters are firing in different directions.

Are there buttons to control the blasters? Yes, but they all fire the wrong blasters.

Maybe the wiring is bad. Could he figure out which button fires which blaster and regain control of the ship? Now the entire button panel has gone offline. None of the buttons work.

Is there a lever he could pull to re-activate the button panel? No, the first lever we try is the one that permanently disables all the levers. We have lost all control of the ship.

Can we radio for help? No, the radio is also not working. Sparks are coming out.

I guess we’ll have to abandon ship. I suggest getting in our suits to space-walk out of here, but the rocket doors are sealed shut.

I give up at this point, but I’m pretty sure that if I tried to keep going we would fly into an asteroid or the sun or something.

He wants to play this game pretty often (or a variant where robots are destroying everything and can’t be stopped). Today I realized that my 4 year old is running me through the Kobayashi Maru exercise.