T is for Team Player

Better Together

Being a good team player isn’t just about sport, we all have an important role to play in helping to achieve an end goal every day whether that be when working on a class project, looking after the family pet or getting involved with a charitable initiative – locally or globally. We all have different skills to bring to the table and together we can achieve so much more than we can alone. Just look at the mighty bee! What’s more, working in a group brings together a range of different viewpoints sparking lots of creative and fresh ideas. And what better way to learn the value of being a team player than a good old cooperative board or card game. Here’s our faves.

Friends and Neighbours – The Helping Game by Peaceable Kingdom

This matching game helps young children identify emotions and learn how to respond to them. Can you help a little girl who is sad because she’s standing out in the rain or a boy who’s afraid of the dark? Players move around the board by helping people, pulling tokens out of the Helping Bag and matching it to someone on the game board who it might help. By reading the characters’ feelings, children develop empathy and understanding. It includes a social and emotional intelligence parent guide and friends and story book. Peaceable Kingdom specialises in making non-competitive board games designed to encourage kids to work together as a team instead of against each other. Other cooperative games in their range include Hoot Owl Hoot, Snug As A Bug in a Rug, Mole Rats in Space and Feed the Woozle.

Trapped

Escape rooms are the ultimate team game requiring communication and collaborative team work while also developing problem solving skills. Trapped is an escape room in a box and it’s perfect for getting the whole family working together to crack the clues, solve the puzzles and escape the room! Every edition provides a unique escape room style adventure in the comfort of your own home, containing everything you need to turn your living room in to an escape room! The six games come in three levels – easy, medium and hard with The Zoo and The Carnival perfect for kids age 8+. The games are great for kid’s parties or play dates too!

Beat the Parents

Pitting kids against parents there’s a little bit of competiveness with this one but hopefully it means siblings learn to cooperate with each other, even if it’s just for the duration of the game! We love that at the start each team picks a wager, stating what they’ll do if they lose – take out the rubbish, make dinner. Now that’s true teamwork! What’s more, the parents and children get a different set of trivia questions so that they end up learning lots about the other generations worlds encouraging understanding too!

Forbidden Desert

In this thrilling adventure-based game players must coordinate with one another to recover a legendary flying machine buried deep in the ruins of an ancient desert city, using every available resource to survive the scorching heat, relentless sandstorm and water shortages. We especially love it because each player on the team has a different skill to help you survive, so it’s a perfect example of why working in a cooperative team is beneficial. Other games in the series include Forbidden Island and Forbidden Sky.

Telestrations

Telestrations is a simple premise which combines the game of ‘telephone’ and ‘Pictionary’. Each player has a booklet featuring dry erase pages, and they each write something on the first page. Then, they hand the book to the person next to them. That person then draws a picture of what has been written on the page and hands it to the person next to them. That person then writes down what they think the picture represents and again passes it on. It continues thus until the booklets have gone all the way around the circle at which point the original person flips through the pages to see how what they wrote has been transformed! Needless to say that the unpredictable outcomes provide a lot of laughs. Ultimately there isn’t a ‘winner’ it’s just about having fun together, showing you don’t have to compete with one another to enjoy something!

Last but not least, there are of course lots of free games you can play too which boost team player skills such as taking it turns to tell one line of a story; exquisite corpse where players draw a section of a body before folding down the paper and passing it on to the next player to add the next part; catch; blind folded obstacle course where one person has to lead another through a series of obstacles; pass the balloon; and good old fashioned treasure hunts. We’d love to hear your suggestions too!