Playing boardgames is one of my favorite pastimes. I love cracking open my dusty box of CLUE, or breaking out a well-worn Scrabble board on a rainy day. Boardgames are undoubtedly a great way to spend quality time with friends and family. If we look beyond the board, cards, and dice, though, what is happening in the background?
Boardgames and other collaborative games provide an excellent opportunity for kids to learn social-emotional skills while they play. Just think about all the “soft skills” that are present during a game like Monopoly: communication, basic math, conflict resolution, and critical thinking. Some games help us to plan or think strategically, like chess or RISK. Every game presents an opportunity to flex our social-emotional and cognitive muscles.
The ultimate game, in my opinion, is the tabletop role-playing game, more commonly known as a TRPG. Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), which has had a huge surge in popularity thanks to the television series, Stranger Things, is perhaps the most well-known and played tabletop role-playing game of all time. At its core, D&D is a pencil and paper game in which players control a character they create and use dice to determine the outcome of whatever scenario the Dungeon Master (the storyteller who runs the game) presents to them. Many institutional programs across the United States utilize TRPG’s to help kids work on their social-emotional growth, creativity, conflict resolution, math, communication, and many other skills. I have run a D&D campaign for tweens at the library and noticed many of the kids showed growth in teamwork and patience, specifically.
D&D may be the most popular TRPG, but if wizards and swords are not your thing, there are hundreds of other kinds of role-playing games. There are spooky tabletop games like Call of Cthulhu, or Star Wars themed games, too. Whatever theme you choose, the benefits of your child playing are innumerable.
If the benefits of kids playing boardgames are many, what, if any, are the disadvantages? One Swedish study in 2021 investigated how children aged six to nine interact with boardgames and how it affects their behaviors. After measuring how children behave after playing cooperative and competitive boardgames, the study found no conclusive evidence of negative behavior from any one style of game or another. They did, however, discover that kids simply prefer to play cooperative games.
With all this in mind, don’t miss out on the fun and games at the library! We frequently have programs for tweens and teens to play boardgames or videogames together, puzzles in the Children’s Room for your little ones, and even card games that teens may play inside the Teen Zone. Some of our game programs are even intergenerational. Rook-ie Moves, which occurs the first Monday of each month at 3:30 p.m., is a game club for folks of all ages to come together to play chess and other classic games. Swing by and give it a try! |
