Why Play Games?

If you want your child to learn and also have fun at the same time, that too at a fraction of the cost, play a board game, say experts.

A 2007 study by Carnegie Mellon University showed in a group kindergarten children playing a board game with numbers, such as Snakes and Ladders, helped them improve their performance on mathematical skills.

A board game is a game in which counters or pieces are placed, removed, or moved on a pre-marked surface or 'board' according to a set of rules. Games may be based on pure strategy, chance or a mixture of the two and usually have a goal which a player aims to achieve. Early board games represented a battle between two armies and most current board games are still based on beating opposing players in terms of counters, winning position or accrual of counters.

For majority of board games, any plain flat surface can become a makeshift board game when a game pattern is drawn on it with a piece of chalk or charcoal or a sharp object. Any small enough objects like pebbles or twigs or seeds or bangle slivers can be improvised as game counters while cowries or split tamarind seeds serve as dice. At the end of the gaming session, the board and other gaming paraphernalia are abandoned. Another time and another place, a new gaming session starts with the drawing of a new game pattern. But for games like Chess, Pachisi and Snakes and Ladders, it is quite difficult to prepare game boards by oneself and have to rely on readymade boards and pawns.