Turn Competition into Cooperation with Board Games

In my last article here at The Homeschool Classroom, I talked about cooperative games, where the goal is not to determine one clear winner, but to solve a problem, defeat the enemy, beat the timer or face some other challenge as a group. There are quite a few published games that were created as cooperative games, and last time I talked about several of those. But I left you with a promise to share with you my own ideas for reworking a variety of games to make them cooperative.

Let’s start with any standard “race” game, where the object is to move around the board and get to the end first. Most of us have a copy of Candy Land, so I’ll use that as an example. Soon after he learned the basic rules of Candy Land, my son JediBoy went through a phase where he hated to lose and was a very sore loser. Of course, learning to lose gracefully is one of the great social skills you can encourage your kids to learn with the help of lots and lots of board games, but at the time I could tell from his personality that he wasn’t ready to not win!

Instead, what we did was add a color die to the game. I picked up a blank wooden cube at the craft store and painted the sides red, blue, yellow and green to match the colors of the Candy Land kids. Then, each time we took a turn, we first rolled the die to see which pawn we’d move and then we flipped over a card to see how far to move that pawn. We could still work on turn-taking, color recognition and counting but there was no more winning or losing. We would just talk about which color we thought was going to win this time. Any “race” game can be modified the same way so that you’re not trying to beat the other characters, but to help the pawns in their own race.

For games that are a little more involved, like Sorry! or Aggravation, I take an idea from the deck of Shadows Over Camelot. We take a game that is normally for four people and make one of the colors “The Bad Guys.” The other colors are played as usual by the kids, but with this difference: before you take your turn, you must take one turn for The Bad Guys. The goal of the group is for all of the marbles or pawns to come home before The Bad Guys win. This is a great variation because the kids still get to learn strategy and decision-making, choosing who to send home with a Sorry! card or who to land on in Aggravation, but all the negative consequences are aimed at The Bad Guys and so there are no hard feelings between players.

Another great option for turning standard board games into cooperative experiences is to work to beat the timer. Guess Who? is a game where two players compete to be the first to guess the other player’s Secret Character by taking turns asking questions – Is your person a girl? Does your person have glasses?. To turn it around, give one player a pile of face-down character cards. Each time the face-up character is guessed, flip over a new card. The other player asks questions about the face-up character as fast as possible, trying to guess as many different characters as he can in 3 minutes. You can work as a team to beat your high score!

You can also change the purpose of a game, building on what’s already there. For example, play Scrabble, but don’t keep track of points. This makes the game move faster, as players aren’t trying to rack up high scores, but are just playing interesting words. When the board is full, the group works together to create a story using all the words from the board! This was something my sister and I used to do and we had lots of fun creating silly stories with our Scrabble words. I bet this would be a great activity for a group of teen or pre-teen homeschoolers.

Any game can be tweaked to make it an enjoyable cooperative venture. Do you have any games at home that you’d like to make new rules for? Have you tried something like this already? I’d love to hear about it!

In between board games, PisecoMom squeezes in a little homeschooling for her two adorable children at Mind Games.

No related posts.