Skulls in the Stars

I’m now in my mid-50s and my parents are in their 80s and are starting to experience the age-related cognitive problems that most of us will eventually encounter if we live that long. My dad in particular has very poor short-term memory now and is living in a senior home, a situation he finds rather dull considering he spent his life being a wanderer both at home and abroad.

To help keep him entertained, I’ve been finding boardgames that we can play together when I visit. This turns out to be a non-trivial challenge for several reasons. Memory issues make learning any new game rather challenging, so rules have to be relatively simple and intuitive — no Magic Realm for us! This means that most of the games available are ones that are tailored more towards children, but this is also not ideal because neither my dad nor I are in the mood to play Candyland. There are classic games that he still has a recollection of how to play, like Monopoly, but that game is absolutely terrible and genuinely not fun. As I told my dad, Monopoly is only fun because of the people you’re playing it with. Another constraint is time — I don’t want to play a game that takes several hours for a single session, so games with a 20-30 minute turnaround are ideal. That way we can play a couple of different games and multiple rounds when I visit.

So I’ve been experimenting with various games to find a set that we can play regularly, are easy enough to learn, fast to play, and entertaining enough to play repeatedly. I thought I would share my results and give a ranking of their suitability for this purpose.

NOTE: all the games I mention here are good games in general, so my ranking is not about whether they’re good in general, but all about their suitability for playing with seniors with memory issues.

Tsuro: 9/10. I’ve had this game for ages and it is good for all ages and pretty much any occasion. Players take turns laying out a path tile in front of their token and following the path as far as they can go. The goal is to be the last one run off the edge of the board. Very simple rules that are quick to learn and follow, and the game has a nice mix of randomness (tile drawing) and strategy (choose one of three tiles in your hand to place). The only limitation for aging seniors is the abstract nature of the game — I noticed that it is perhaps a little harder to follow simply because it doesn’t represent situation in the real world to give context and help the player remember the objective and the strategy. Still, one I’ve played the most with my dad.