We seek to equip others with the power to use games for their education and community based goals. To assist in meeting these goals we want to provide you with some resources that we have vetted and believe can help others learn about the power of games, get better at teaching games, or even to learn about the designs underlying games. To these ends we provide the following recommended books, articles, videos, podcasts, scholarly articles, online communities, and websites that talk board games in education. Simply clock any of the buttons below to go to their respective area of the site.
Do you have additional content that you believe should be listed here? Please share it with us by emailing ContactUs@TabletopAlliance.org.
Do you have work you want featured? We publish articles on our site to raise up the voices and experiences that are occurring with games in education and community programs. To submit article ideas please email Article@TabletopAlliance.org.
Your Move: What Board Games Teach us About Life
-Jonathan Kay & Joan Moriarty
Game Tek: The Math and Science of Gaming
– Geoff Engelstein
Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms
-Geoff Engelstein & Isaac Shalev
To learn more about Shut Up & Sit Down visit: http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/
JonGetsGames – https://www.youtube.com/user/JonGetsG…
WatchItPlayed – https://www.youtube.com/user/WatchItP…
Before you Play – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3z8YEKBEjSPRb6L2RJPWUg
To learn more about Watch It Played visit: https://www.youtube.com/user/WatchItPlayed
Want to learn more about Tabletop Alliance? Check out episode 30 of the Game’s Played Badly YouTube/Podcast where our President Bruce Brown was invited on to talk about our nonprofit work!
Note: Podcasts are available on a variety of platforms. To acknowledge this, we provide the podcast link that is available on each content host’s website. From there we encourage you to listen on your preferred platform.
“A podcast about the ‘why’ of gaming.” This podcast is extremely influential. One of the founders, Geoff Engelstein, is the author of two of the books you see listed as our recommended reads above. Episodes range from:
- Extremely educationally insightful conversations with game designers and publishers
- “GameTek” episodes which explore the science, math, and more behind games
- “Biography of a Board Game” episodes which investigates the history of classic and modern board games
Each episode has a features content aimed at helping educators use gaming towards their purposes by sharing stories, resources, and more. Often episodes end by having an actual live play of some games being adapted towards particular outcomes.
Hosted by Dave Eng of University XP, each episode digs into different topics surrounding games-based learning.
The Game Schooler Podcast© is a weekly audio show celebrating the educational value of tabletop gaming. Each week Doug and Michael recommend a family-friendly game and uncover the skills players can learn during gameplay. Every episode includes discussion on the merits of gameschooling and features a Weekly High Five list of additional games listeners may want to explore.
BoardGameGeek.com – Games in the Classroom
This is a great forum based community in the very popular BoardGameGeek.com ecosystem. Feel free to go through the forum threads and ask questions of fellow educators.
BoardGameGeek.com (BGG)
This is essentially THE place for board games online. Create a free account and join in on all the conversations related to gaming. You can find sub communities on here for just about every passion area…and then some.
This is a great community that talks about games in all sorts of formats as well as shares deals on games that people stumble across.
Want to find some great resources on gaming, gamification, and serious gaming in you’ll want to look into Board Gaming with Education.
Educational Wargaming Cooperative
Interested in learning about the use of wargaming in training and education? Check out this unique group!
Kathleen Mercury’s Resources to Teach Strategy Game Design
Phenomenal website with teaching resources, syllabi, recommended games, and so much more to assist you in teaching game design in a classroom.
A site full of articles, course you can take, videos, podcast, and more all surrounding the topic of Game-based learning! Even hosts a conference!
YouTube.com Channels
Here is a great, and no where near exhaustive, list of Board Game content creators that you can use to help further your knowledge of gaming.
Flip It Consulting – Applying Bloom’s Taxonomy to Game Design
A wonderful short resource breaking down the very useful outcome development framework of Bloom’s Taxonomy and thoughtful prompts on how to apply it into the game design process.