Photos by Garrett Liberman ’25
Ben Krueger loves board games. The Upper School Science Teacher and MICDS Athletic Trainer appreciates this social activity that not only brings people together in a unique way but also helps facilitate strategic thinking and communication. He shaped his love into a Board Game Design Winter Term course, sharing insights and strategies with his students.
While living in the digital era, unplugging from a screen can be refreshing and sometimes necessary to maintain physical and mental health. A great alternative social activity, which has exploded in popularity over the past decade, is playing modern tabletop board games. These aren’t just your traditional board games like Candyland, Trouble, Chutes and Ladders, or Sorry, but rather, are games that require deeper strategy and critical thinking, and have a more thematic concept attached.
In Krueger’s course, students played a variety of modern tabletop board games and learned some of the various mechanisms that make the games work. Then, they embarked on developing their own game prototype, utilizing a design-thinking framework to bring their games to life. They assembled their prototypes using standard materials like a cardboard game board, cards, different pawns and tokens, and dice. «I have had some students who utilized the Biggs Family Makerspace to 3D print unique components to their games, which helped infuse the theme,» said Krueger. The students maintained design diaries throughout the creative process to organize their thoughts and set goals. They also learned to give and receive meaningful feedback and figured out how to articulate rules in written form.
«My favorite board game is called Time Stories,» Krueger shared. «I love it because it’s a cooperative game where players have to work together to win the game as a collective. The players are ‘time traveling agents’ who venture into a unique scenario in another reality and have to solve a mystery together. The game has led to many memorable moments and demonstrated to me how board games can be so much more than just the classics like Monopoly.»
In addition to having fun, Krueger wants his students to share what they’ve learned. «My main hope is that the students will have at least a greater awareness and interest in board games as a social activity to do with friends and family, especially today when most entertainment is consumed digitally. I also hope they will be able to see how design thinking can be applied to just about any creative endeavor.»
Great job, board game designers! Now, whose turn is it?