Recently I was able to get into a small group and try out two different board games that either had educational qualities or the potential to be educational. In this blog I will talk about both games and review them based on points in my Game Design text.
Ticket to Ride:
The first game I played was called Ticket to Ride. It reminded me a lot of Monopoly while lacking any kind of money or other currency. The premise of the game is to build railroad lines connecting various cities across North America. Using a simple card draw system, players build lines to connect cities, building a full track to their destination, winning them points. The main player-game interaction comes from the card draw. Random chance is always a good way to mix up the action in any game. The aspect that really makes me think of the real estate game, however, is in blocking tracks. Some sections of track are smaller than others, making them easier to build on. By taking your turn to build on one of these smaller sections, you can get a small amount of points, while at the same time blocking another track build if another player was hoping to use that section. This sort of railway monopoly blocking also feels like the primary player-player interaction. Players having to decide to either build their own way or stop another player cold provides a good competitive aspect that keeps it interesting. I liked the game overall, but on its face there isn't much educational value. My instructor's assumption about the game (that it focused on western railroad expansion) could be utilized to give the game an educational background, I think.
Trivial Pursuit: Totally 80's:
Trivial Pursuit at this point in time shouldn't need an introduction, it's the classic trivia-based board game. For those of you who don't know what it is though, here's a quick rundown: You have a piece on a board that looks like it's missing several parts, pie slice-shaped parts, specifically. You roll a die and move that many spaces in any direction, you'll land on a space of a particular color, at which point another player pulls a question card and reads the question that corresponds to that color on the card (Different colors mean different topics, like music, movies, news, etc) if you get it right, you can roll again. There are 6 spaces on the edge of the board that are each a different color/subject. Landing on these spaces and answering the corresponding question correctly earns you a pie piece of that color. Winning the game consists of getting all 6 pieces, returning to the center of the board and answering a final question.
This game was fun, with too many players my group split into two teams. Sadly the game never really took off since the game's questions were set in the 80's and none of us were particularly knowledgeable about that decade. Most of the questions had everyone stumped and saying "huh?" when the answer was finally given. A more relevant version of the game would have been better for us.
Player-player interaction is small, mostly sticking to players reading each other the questions. Team-based games have more interaction between players, but it's still minimal. The most interaction is player-game, between the dice rolls, the random card draw and the questions themselves. Basically it's a quiz game with a board under it, which means it could very easily be adapted for educational purposes. Unlike a standard quiz game, however, the board aspect combined with the different topics to question would keep things interesting I think. Overall I see a good deal of education potential in this game, and may craft my own based on this concept.
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