Games for Spatial-Planning Skills

It occurred to me this week that you can’t really teach spatial skills using books or conversations, the way you can teach math or history. Of course (being a board game maniac!) my very next thought was that board games are a great tool for teaching spatial skills. The right board game can give kids a hands-on experience in spatial reasoning and visualizing movement several steps ahead.

There are three spatial-planning games that we really love in our family: The aMAZEing Labyrinth, RoboRally, and Techno Witches.

The aMAZEing Labyrinth is a wonderful, classic kids’ game that Ravensburger first published in 1986. It is playable with 2-4 players or as a solo challenge. The modular board shows a labyrinth with various treasures strewn about. Players are trying to move along the maze in the right way to land on the treasures they have in their pile of cards – the first player to land on all of his/her treasures wins. On each turn, you have to take the one extra maze tile and slide it into one of the rows or columns of tiles, moving the rest of that row or column by one spot, altering the pathways in the maze and hopefully opening up a path you need to take. Labyrinth is easy for my 6 year old son to understand but still a little difficult for him, because it’s not always easy to envision how the paths will change with the addition of one tile. It lends itself to lots of help from me and lots of great discussions about what he can consider before he adds the tile, and I can see that he’s really learning from it.

RoboRally is a funny, furious game from Richard Garfield and Phil Foglio, published by several companies between 1994 and now. In this game with hilarious illustrations of wacky, wild, and disfunctional robots, players have to program five moves before their turn: straight, left turn, right turn, u-turn, and so on. The twist is that all players move at the same time, and so robots can bump into each other, push each other (even off the board or into violent obstacles like crushers and pits!), or shoot each other. The game lets you collect extra features including bigger guns and better planning options as you navigate the floor of a factory, working to hit each of the checkpoints before anyone else does. Playing in a group, you can really see different spatial styles – from guys who can plan their moves without moving a muscle to girls who bob their head this way and that, to one of our dearest friends who even now has to stand up and literally turn his body to figure out which way his robot should turn next! This is a great game for figuring out relative left and relative right and it has enough extra cards and available expansions to keep you happily gaming for a long time.

Techno Witches is a newer tabletop game, published in 2005 by Kosmos (and currently on sale at Funagain Games for only $9!). It can be played with 2-4 players or even as a solo challenge. As the tiny picture to the left suggests (click to see it bigger), this is a game that is played without a board; starting points, goals and obstacles are strewn across a table top instead. Players (on broomsticks!) can choose to add curve pieces from the pot to their spellbooks, programming 1-5 moves ahead of time, or they can choose to move by placing the curves from their spellbook, in order, in front of their current position. If your fancy flier flies off the table or bumps into another player or an obstacle, you have to start again. This is a wonderful way to estimate what length and degree of bend you’ll need to get you where you need to go, and the instruction book comes with plenty of different ways to play depending on the level of challenge you’d like.