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, whose name is now escaping me. Something where people felt empowered to create some semblance of order in what would initially seem to be a chaos of pieces or cards.

 

I found games like that to be very powerful tools. Particularly if a person was not particularly wanting to talk to a counselor or was in sort of the "fight or flight" mode. It was a great redirect to get their mind temporarily off the crisis at hand. Most people going to see a counselor are not expecting him to pull out a board game. That would seem counter-intuitive because you don't necessarily need to throw in a wild card into an already antsy situation, but in some cases, that was precisely what they would need: Let's just put the crisis off to the side for a few moments and regroup with a game and a cup of tea. It was amazing how surprisingly disarming a game could be at that.

 

And in that process, you could often just see the stress level go down exponentially. This was particularly good with children who were already on edge about meeting "another grown up" who just wants to talk about "feelings and crap" (I got statements like that a lot.)

 

Now, aside from the de-escalation aspect, those games also let the therapist (who knows the rules) play his hand in a way that can demonstrate a few life lessons. You can intentionally misplay your hand. Those games are fabulous because at the end, you can easily demonstrate where you "went wrong" with how you played. And in that is a good life lesson for those in crisis, because you can show that even in chaos, you can take good or bad steps that cascade to good or bad results. (Some games are better that demonstrating this that others.) Even an adult who has his life together can make well meaning but deleterious decisions that affect outcome.

 

Likewise, if you explain the game correctly, the person in crisis can learn the life lesson that in the chaos, you still have some control to make good decisions that affect the outcome. You may not win or get all the points you want at the end of the particular game, but you can look back and see where you made good decisions and where you started to panic and made bad decisions. Showing that chain can lead to very good discussions (maybe not that session but in continuing sessions later) about how you can make decisions to bring order to the chaos.

 

I know this all sounds very Mr. Miyagi, and my fellow counselors thought it was poppycock, but I generally had good results in places where I thought where establishing a good life lesson would be applicable.