Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Today my family and I played a strategy board game named Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn. Last week I wrote that parents should try playing strategy games like this with their kids. I made this suggestion to provide ideas for how parents can evaluate and discuss emotional intelligence with their kids. More specifically, evaluate and discuss the emotional intelligence domain of relationship management.

Now that I’ve played Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn with my family, I have a few additional observations. I hope these observations can help you with two things:

• Get the most out of playing games like this as a means of working with your children on their emotional intelligence
• Streamline your gaming experience by avoiding the mistakes I made the first time through

Before You Start Playing

If you are like me, you are a novice playing complex board games like this. When I opened the box I was in for a rude awakening. I didn’t expect so many pieces and I didn’t expect the instructions to be 15 pages long. I made the mistake of opening the box, taking out all of the pieces and going through the instructions for the first time with my family all sitting there.

This mistake added about 90 minutes to the total time to get to the end of our first game. My recommendation is to do all of this on your own before your family sits down with you to play. By setting up the game, and reading through all the instructions you can better facilitate the experience for the other members of your family. This will allow everybody to get more out of the game and enjoy it much more.

Playing the Game

First thing first, playing this game has now confirmed my belief that strategy board games are a good tool for evaluating and discussing emotional intelligence with kids. The game brought out many emotions in each of my family members. There were conflicts, opportunities to negotiate win-win solutions and influence others, as well as other aspects of relationship management. Given that, there were many teachable moments throughout the game.

In addition, I think it’s important to point out that this game states that it’s for those ages 14 and older. However, I played with my 8 and 12 year old. There is no doubt that this slowed down our game play, but they did great and enjoyed the game a lot once we got in the flow of it. Our total time playing including setup was roughly 4 hours. We started last night and spent 90 minutes setting up, reading instructions, and watching YouTube videos with tips. We exhausted ourselves at that point. So we woke up this morning to start playing and finished the game in about 2.5 hours.

I do believe if my kids were older we could have finished in less than 2 hours. Nonetheless, it was time well spent.

Final Thoughts

This game is not only good for evaluating and discussing emotional intelligence with kids, it’s also a great tool to learn more about your kid’s personality. Using the behavior clues I wrote about in this article, you can identify what drives your child’s self-motivation while playing this game. So not only will you have fun playing, you can truly learn a lot about your kids if you pay attention closely to their behavior.

Overall, I really enjoyed playing Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn with my family. I highly recommend it for a family game night. It’s a 4 player game, so it was perfect for my family. What’s more, it’s complex enough to have partner teams if you have more than 4 people in your family.