12 hours ago, Acharis said:

BTW, have you used  it? Also, does it have some graphical capabilities (draw line, draw image, etc) as old Basics had?

Yes it does, and image loading/blitting and so on - you can even use DLLs to add stuff like sound etc..

Also there's several IDEs to choose from, it's really a good beginner environment for a young mind

Definitely something with a larger focus on programming. The age here isn't the problem, making games with things like Scratch wouldn't teach a 30-year old on how they work. Game Maker I'd recommend a lot, it's programming language, while horribly designed, is great as a first language.

Although, I'd also recommend starting programming from scratch completely, and to forget gamedev for now. You could try teaching Lua, then move on to Love2D. After that you can make the leap to C and then onto C++.

FWIW I tend to agree with Richard Stallman on this one point: the best way to learn programming is by making small changes to large programs. This is how I learned C; I just made small changes to The Ur-Quan Masters, Naev, and Project: Starfighter, then bigger and bigger changes, until eventually I became a regular contributor to Naev and the active maintainer of Project: Starfighter.

So from that perspective, I actually tend to think making a new board game is a poor choice for learning. Much better would be to modify an existing open source game that he likes.

But ultimately, not everyone develops a passion for programming, and that's okay. So if a kid just wants to make some board games, I tend to think it's best to give them an open source board game engine like VASSEL; if it works, it works, and if it doesn't, they can open up the source code and tinker with it while learning stuff along the way.

Or, the route of making physical board games is possible too. I went that route recently with a card game I designed. Not everything has to be on a computer.