Does your family enjoy board games? Our youngest son is a board game enthusiast. I can’t count the hours we’ve spent playing games with him and my other children. While we’ve never really set one particular evening aside as an official “Game Night”, we tend to have them quite frequently. It’s been fun seeing the types of games we enjoy change over the years. If your family is like mine and enjoys similar time together, you’ve probably come to realize like I have that this time is precious and can create great opportunities for open conversation while also being educational.
The value of this quality time hasn’t gone unnoticed by game creators EQtainment. Their new Q Wunder Board Game- Q’s Race to the Top is created specifically for the purpose of improving your children’s emotional intelligence, or emotional quotent.
That sounds quite fancy doesn’t it? What is that specifically, you may ask? You can think of this as all the important social skills outside of their academic education, such as self control, motivation, empathy.
In fact, studies have shown that having a high emotional quotient (social skills) boosts career success, relationship satisfaction, leadership skills, health, humor, and happiness.
EQtainment puts value on and helps kids practice healthy emotions through fun and affordable games, storybooks, and videos.
That’s the “why grown-ups like it” behind Q’s Race to the Top Board Game. For the kids it much more simple. All they want is for a game to be fun and entertaining. They probably don’t even understand that they’re honing in on understanding important life skills. They’re just playing a game and if they’re like mine, they’re competitive while they’re doing it.
The hook for my boys is the bright and colorful game board, simple instructions, and fun character pieces. There are four Q characters, which is the monkey that is introduced in the storybook that comes with the game.
There are three color sets of cards, and whichever space your monkey Q lands on is the card that is drawn. Each color card has a different set of instructions that help your child verbalize feelings, think creatively, and talk about behavior in a way that starts great conversations.
We recently took a vacation for the weekend, and we brought along our board games for entertainment during down time. The boys had quite the friendly competition going on, to the entertainment of the older kids. One question that came up was “Do you ever throw a fit? What is the right way to act when you don’t get what you want?”
Let me just say, that question alone promoted some very interesting conversation among the whole family. We laughed at some of the answers, but in the long run the little ones were able to come up with some very healthy answers.
What I’ve found I like most about this game are the conversations that have been sparked and the thoughts that have been provoked enough to ponder even later after we’re through playing.
I even overheard my second grader chatting with my oldest son about one of the funny actions he had to do from one of the cards.
A Kickstarter campaign has officially begun for Q’s Race to the Top. It would be great to help raise the support to get this fun game into the hands of parents and educators everywhere.
