American History Board Games

There are plenty of great ways to study American History with your kids, including wonderful books and some captivating movies. But don’t forget the games!

Any history lesson can be easily adapted into an answer-and-move board game. You can write questions that relate to your American History studies on the front of an index card and answers on the back – we usually cut the index card in half to make the cards a little easier to handle. Dates, names, and basic events all work well as simple questions. Now scour your games for a board that would work – you can play Trivial Pursuit style, use the single-path board from Pictionary, or even use a Chutes and Ladders board! Answer a question correctly, and then you can roll the die or spin the spinner to move. The fun part about repurposing a younger kids’ game is that siblings of several ages can play together – younger brothers & sisters can just move as usual without answering the questions first.

Of course, there are several commercial games available that feature American History. Our two favorites are Made for Trade and Early American Chrononauts.

Made for Trade is a game that was originally published by Aristoplay. In this game, kids get a glimpse of what life was like in the early Colonies. The board is set up like a map with different village buildings including eight different shops. Each shop has 6 different items available for purchase, and players move around the board, paying taxes, avoiding gaol, and trying to buy items. The game comes with instructions for several levels of play and includes shopping lists with specific items that older players need to purchase or trade for in order to win. The instruction book also has a nice glossary of the items, explaining what they are used for and how they were made. The advanced versions of gameplay also include Historical Event cards which give snippets of historical information and change the play of the game. This game doesn’t teach a lot of history, specifically, but is great especially for elementary students to get the feel of the times.

Early American Chrononauts is a terrific game from Looney Labs that lets you explore how different historical events impacted others. (This is a sequel to their original Chrononauts which covered a wider range of world history; the two games each stand alone but can also be combined for one enormous game.) In Early American Chrononauts, you spread a set of event cards on the table, in chronological order. Players have identities and mission cards, unique ways to win based on the ways in which you change the past. There are patch cards which change the events as we know them. For example, you may have the identity of Jim, who wins when citizens are “Only Halfway Free” – the Declaration of Independence was written as we know it, but someone has placed a patch over the end of the Civil War so that the South won. This is a terrific game for getting kids – and adults – to think about what our lives would be like now if even one famous historical event had turned out differently.

For general history (as well as pop culture and other topics), we love the All American version of Trivial Pursuit which came out in the early 1990′s. You’ll have to search the thrift stores and yard sales – or eBay – for that one. A similar game that is better suited to younger kids and also currently in print is The All American Trivia Board Game Junior Edition, by Outset Media. Although it is billed as a geography game, Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? also includes a fair amount of history and culture in the questions players have to answer in order to get clues and catch the crooks.

Do you have any other games that you’ve played with your kids which teach them – directly or indirectly – about American history?

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

images courtesy of BoardGameGeek

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