That TCG Blogger

What does slaying dragons, rolling dice, and shuffling a few cards actually teach you? If you don’t know, then think about this; a group (about a hundred) of high school students in Edmonton, Canada gathered together for a Junior Achievement Monopoly tournament. The organizers of Junior Achievement designed the tournament to not only gather these students to get to know each other, but to teach economics through the game itself (the group is based on business). Teaching, through a board game? Preposterous! But then I sat back and thought about it for a minute and began to realize just how much we really get from board games and never notice.

“What lessons are there to be taught from Monopoly?” I asked myself. There’s the obvious, such as conserving funds, probability of a dice roll, and knowing the other player’s inventory. What I didn’t realize right then, were the deeper lessons that normally are only taught through first hand experience: bartering with the opponents, observing facial expressions to predict future actions, and planning ahead for the future. Normally, human beings don’t come into course with actions such as these until they have already graduated high school, but every board/card game fanatic out there has already encountered, and probably mastered, these traits thanks to the games.

Of course though, after thinking these deeply (and being as skeptical as I am), I thought that Monopoly was probably designed to be somewhat of an educational game to begin with. Having to add and subtract money all the time seemed like a simple gimmick to teach children math, so I did the obvious and took it a step further and did some research with other games. Dungeons & Dragons (or any Table-Top RPG for that matter) has always been known for its difficult rules and diverse strategy. Just by glancing over the character customization, you can already see the lesson in decision making is imminent with the new player; and once you have your stats set the player needs to know their characters strengths and weaknesses in order to be successful. D&D was then added to the educational list after just a few seconds of thought.

The next subject on my research list was to take an educational look at the trading card game industry. Doing so, I took the most popular game, Magic: the Gathering, in the community and analyzed it. Choosing your deck allows you to practice decision making and even predict how those decisions affect you (your deck) in the future. Not to mention that in the actual game play, players are automatically forced to predict their opponents moves in order to be somewhat successful in the game. When you tap your mana, you also get an economics lesson on spending your currency wisely and making the right choice. So next time you’re planning to activate Wrath of God to clear out your opponent’s token filled field, think about the mana you could’ve saved by switching to Pyroclasm.

After looking through the complex games that make through way through the market, it seemed only one thing was left; the extremely simple games. The original board games of yester years still showed the indirect educational values as everything else had. Clue had deductive skills, Scrabble gave vocabulary, and even go-fish gave the reasoning lesson. After countless hours (and a lot of rambling), I’ve come to the conclusion that board and card games are the closest things to real world experience one can find without actually knowing so. Who knew that you could prepare for your future by rolling some dice and casting spells? Next time, you decide to draw a card or move your pawn, think to yourself “What am I learning through this?” you might even be shocked with what you come up with.

Source: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/life/Monopoly+good/2594162/story.html

-That TCG Blogger-

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