Our family game night has three different definitions of fair

My six-year-old thinks a family game is fair when he has a real chance to win.

My eleven-year-old thinks it is fair when everybody follows the printed rules.

My husband thinks it is fair when we finish without anyone crying. That last definition has produced some spectacularly suspicious dice rolls.

We were playing a board game on Friday when our older child noticed her brother had been allowed to undo a move she couldn't undo. She wasn't wrong. I had given him another try because he hadn't understood what the space meant.

Now she wanted her previous move back too.

The game had stopped being entertaining because we were deciding the rules after seeing who they helped.

There are three options I can actually imagine for this table.

We can play the printed game, with someone helping our younger child understand his choices before he makes them. That preserves the result our older child cares about, but it won't make every loss pleasant.

We can agree on a simpler family version before starting. That gives everyone the same altered rules, though our older child may decide it isn't the game she wanted to play.

Or we can choose something where we work toward a shared result. That changes the evening more substantially. It also doesn't have to become our only kind of game just because this Friday went badly.

What isn't working is secretly adjusting the result while calling everything equal.

I don't need the six-year-old to lose gracefully on command. I don't need the eleven-year-old to enjoy every concession we make for him. I need us to stop asking them to agree that a moving target is a rule.

Next Friday, I'm planning to put the options on the table before the board. Either child can say that a particular version doesn't sound fun. We may have to pick something else.

How do you choose when the purpose of the same game is competition for one child and togetherness for another? I'd rather acknowledge that mismatch than keep settling it with my husband's extremely fortunate dice.