Board Games and Counseling Methods
Continuing my thoughts on board gaming, I used to do short term crisis counseling, and I found board games to be amazing tools in certain instances. This was years ago, and there was virtually no academic studies or any empirical data on this subject as far as I could tell at the time. I think there is more now. I was largely shooting in the dark with this method. Most of my fellow counselors and therapists thought I was nuts (as they themselves clung to their weird Schools of Psychology like neo-Freudianism and whatever but that's a discussion for another day). I found though that games that were not high stress/high stakes games could do wonders at getting people out of a crisis mode. Games that had some strategy with rules that could easily be explained, particularly if it was spatial in some way. The earlier versions of games like Sagrada or Lanterns or Azul...that kind of thing. There was an old print and play game that I think became Patchwork that I could use, w...