Slate’s Caitlin McDevitt has a great feature about board games that teach kids unfortunate financial lessons.
Monopoly has taught us that financial institutions are invincible. The game’s banker cannot go bankrupt, according to the rules: “The Bank never ‘goes broke.’ If the Bank runs out of money, the Banker may issue as much as needed by writing on any ordinary paper.”
I think the worst game profiled has to be Mall Madness, which I have to confess I hadn’t heard of before this article. The game rewards players for spending money, and actually won’t let you save your money once it’s in your hand:
Once you get money from the bank, you can’t go back to the bank until you buy something. If you stop at the bank without buying something first, the Voice will say, ‘Bank closed.’ “
Can you think of games that teach good financial lessons to kids? Let us know in the comments!
And check out this classic commercial for Mall Madness, “The Shop Till You Drop Game That Really Talks”:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MX2hxmfx_Q[/youtube]
One Comment
There are many good boardgames on the market that will teach good financial economic.
One of my favorite is Agricola. This game is based on farming. In Agricola, you’re a farmer in a wooden shack with your spouse and little else. On a turn, you get to take only two actions from all the possibilities you’ll find on a farm: collecting clay, wood, or stone; building fences; adding animals to your farm, and so on.
You might think about having kids in order to get more work accomplished, but first you need to expand your house. Then after a few turns, you will have the harvest phase in which you will collect the goods and will need to provide things to your family.
This is a good example of game where you need to manage your asset and build a strategy in order to be able win.
There are a lot more games like this. Just to name a few:
Power Grid where you need to buy power plants, power links and resources.
Chinatown where you need to learn to negotiate if you want to win.
Settlers of Catan (most popular game after Monopoly!) where you need to manage resources (there is no money in this game) and trade with others.
These games are called Euro style games or Strategy games and they will teach you to some extent how to manage your asset, negotiate, build a strategy in order to win. Usually, luck as little to do with wining.