Board games can be used to teach children about taking turns, being respectful, and cooperating with others. They can also help them learn how to lose gracefully and be happy for the winner — essential life lessons that will serve them well in playdates, school, and beyond.
As a game designed to help kids carry on a conversation and consider others’ perspectives includes 280 scenario cards on which kids can practice.
Emotion Charades
Getting kids to talk about their feelings is essential to emotional self-regulation. A simple charade game can help them do this by encouraging them to recognize and act out different emotions.
Have students pick a card from a bowl with a specific emotion written on it, such as happy or sad. Then, the student must act out that emotion to the rest of the class without using words. This teaches kids to be expressive with their body language and helps them develop empathy for others’ feelings.
Another great way to teach children about emotions is with the social skills board game, which features 280 scenarios that help kids understand and express their feelings healthily. This game can be played at home or in the classroom and builds listening, perspective-taking, and emotional regulation.
Checker Stack
Playing the best board games for families, like checkers, can help kids build motor skills, learn strategic planning and develop a sense of cooperation and sharing. This game can also teach children to respect one another.
Players take alternating turns, during which they can move or capture the opposing color’s stacks (or “traitor” pieces) with their checkers, but they cannot bear off a singleton or remove enemy pieces from the board. This changes the winning condition slightly from regular checkers but still allows for a good dose of strategy and problem-solving.
This social skills game encourages participants to use only gestures when speaking and to consider other players’ perspectives. It is recommended by Dr. Susan Williams White as a great way to practice anticipation and to teach strategies, critical thinking, and perspective-taking.
Decision-Making Games
There are many ways to teach social skills, but sometimes a more subtle approach is best. Research suggests incorporating social skills into fun; lighthearted games are more effective than obvious teaching methods like lectures and role-playing.
For example, the game “What Should I Do Now?” helps kids solve various difficult social situations with empathy and compassion. It features over 150 unique scenarios that encourage conversation and discussion.
Another decision-making game, “Right or Wrong?” encourages responsibility, truthfulness, cooperation, and fairness. It’s a great way to help kids develop character and learn to make better decisions. Like checkers, this game also teaches them to be persistent and thoughtful. It’s a good choice for kids who have trouble maintaining a calm, consistent voice and tone of voice.
Cooperative Games
Cooperative games are a great alternative to competitive activities that can deflate kids and make them feel discouraged. They eliminate us-versus-them perceptions and zero-sum thinking and allow children to experience the fun and challenge of playing together.
Children learn to take turns and communicate with one another as they work together towards a common goal in these unique board games. They also develop social-emotional skills like empathy, deductive reasoning, and problem-solving.
Cooperative play and games are powerful tools for building classroom community, inclusion, and social-emotional learning. This book provides a comprehensive explanation of teaching methods and practical guidelines, a survey of relevant research and interesting stories, visuals, historical context, and numerous game samples to experiment with. It will interest administrators, therapists, school psychologists and teachers, and parents who want to promote child development and healthy relationships in the classroom.
Face-Reading Games
Kids who are good at reading faces and understanding emotions tend to be more prosocial or helpful toward others. This is one of the reasons that many social skills groups use board games as part of their therapy programs.
These games teach children to follow instructions and listen carefully while other players speak. Often they also need to wait their turn and negotiate with their teammates. For example, the card game Sequence requires attentiveness and concentration.
Even young toddlers can build social skills with a simple game of rolling the ball. It teaches kids to take turns and builds self-control as they aim for their friends using limited force. A similar game that taps into children’s natural tendency to help other people is joint music-making. A 2010 study found that when kids used musical instruments to “wake” toy frogs in a pond, they were likelier to help others (Kirschner and Tomasello).
Role-Playing Games
Educators have found that role-playing games boost social skills by learning to interact and communicate with others. They can also develop better self-esteem and build a strong sense of belonging to a community.
Harviainen (2022) describes simulation as representing a facet of reality, which can be either a real-world or a fictional experience. He also points out that the level of agency can vary between activities that give their participants no control and those where the inputs of their players shape how the action happens.
For example, a game lets players practice different negotiation styles with virtual 3D agents in scenarios based on Rahim’s model. While a game lets prospective police officers reenact street interventions with loitering juveniles.
Token Stack
Stacker is a social token system that allows players to exchange virtual items (such as vehicles) in games. Each token has a unique name and value. Players can select tickets using a keyboard hotkey (default is’]’) or the mouse. Several tokens can be set at once. The module allows players to cycle through tokens stacked on top of one another in a ‘token stack,’ making retrieving small tickets buried under large ones easy.
In a typical game, the Top X receive supplemental boosts to their token balances of magnitude linked to their ranking. Those between X and some threshold Y keep their balances, while those outside the Top Y lose a portion. The game is played over three rounds.
