Most of us have great (or perhaps not-so-great) memories of playing board games as kids, with rainy days filled with long games of Monopoly or Risk. Many of us likely also have some experience playing some less-than-fun “educational” games with our parents or a well-meaning relative.
Since those days, board game design has improved dramatically. Today, you can find many board games and card games on store shelves that not only manage to pack a lot of fun for adults and families into a short amount of time, but also teach real-world concepts about money, investing and debt.
Here are five such games that draw on the real world of money concepts to teach personal finance skills while keeping your kids entertained. (Note: Games are listed with their manufacturer’s suggested retail price.)
[See: Basic Money Lessons You (Probably) Missed in High School.]
For Sale (Gryphon Games, $25.99). This is a simple card game in which all players start with an equal amount of money and use that money to bid in auctions for houses of different quality, represented by a deck of cards with numbers from one to 30. Those homes are then sold to buyers who are willing to pay well for the best house available.
It’s a great little card game that finishes in just 10 or 15 minutes and powerfully reinforces the concept of getting the most value for your dollar. This game is won by seeking out bargains, then getting full value (or more) for that home you just bought.
[See: How to Talk to Millennials About Money.]
Modern Art (CMON Games, $29.99). Check out this beautifully illustrated auction game in which you represent one of five art galleries that has been commissioned to sell off paintings at auction. Your goal is to profit from those sales while also winning some of the auctions to buy paintings of whichever artist happens to be the current “hot” artist.
Modern Art is a beautiful and brilliantly designed game that teaches how auctions work, but more importantly demonstrates how the value of objects can change over time. What seems like a sure bet might decline in value while other art pieces might take off. As you play, you learn how to “read” your hand and the actions of other players to get an early sense of what’s going to go up in value and what’s going to go down. The current edition, by CMON Games, also includes a beautifully illustrated introductory guide to modern art and several artists.
Catan Fifth Edition (Catan Studio, $49). This classic game puts you in the role of a leader of a group wanting to settle the undiscovered land of Catan, which is dynamically generated each time by setting out tiles on the table. You start off with just a couple of small towns on the newly made board, but soon those towns will begin harvesting goods — wood, brick, wheat, sheep and iron — and then use those goods to either build improvements to your towns, start new ones or upgrade those towns into cities. The player who upgrades most efficiently is the winner.
Catan is a wonderful game of trading, scarcity, and supply and demand. The game encourages players to trade with each other, and the dynamic board setup causes different resources — in one game, it might be sheep, for example — to be rare in each game. This teaches how scarcity can cause items to become more valuable.
Stockpile (Nauvoo Games, $50). This is a really clever little stock market investing game in which players act on information to trade and invest in available stocks. Each round, players receive a secret piece of information that says a particular stock is going to go up or down. They then use this information to make smart investments in the stocks available to them, which are sold in groups.
Stockpile does a great job of simulating how the stock market works and how learning more about stocks makes you a more savvy investor. It also strongly reinforces the value of buying low and selling high.
[See: 10 Things Everyone Should Know About Money.]
Ponzi Scheme (Tasty Minstrel Games, $59.95). In this game, each player is trying to run a financial scam called a Ponzi scheme, meaning that they borrow money from investors to finance their own investments and pay back just the interest on those loans each round. Eventually, someone reaches a point where they can no longer afford the interest and they go bankrupt, and that player loses. The player who remains in the game with the best investments wins.
Ponzi Scheme is great wheeling-and-dealing fun, but underneath the game is a powerful illustration of the dangers of debt. The player who loses is crushed by his or her debt, and even the winner likely barely escapes being pulled under by the debt load. If you want to play a game where you feel the clock ticking as your debts pile up, this one will do the trick.
All of these games play in about an hour with flexible numbers of players and all of them are surprisingly fun for couples, small groups of adults and families with older children. Some games, such as For Sale, can even work for younger children. All of them manage to be really fun by actually incorporating money concepts into the rules of the game rather than lecturing on them.
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5 Fun Board Games and Card Games That Teach Money Concepts originally appeared on usnews.com
