Designing a board game for Aspies: help and tips requested

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Hi

I'm studying for a bachelor's in art therapy, and the teacher has given my group the task of designing a board game. We've chosen to design our game for Aspies


So I'd like to ask you what sort of things you like when you play board games, and how we could design it so that it would appeal to you personally?

We also had to have an aim, so it's supposed to be fun and enjoyable but also help in some way. We only started our course 2 months ago, but as I understand it, people with Asperger's can find it difficult to interpret facial expressions and other people's emotions, am I right? Would you like us to design a game to help practise recognising facial expressions and emotions?

If you think our idea is a load of crap, and you wouldn't like it at all, please let me know. If you think it could be good and you've got some suggestions, please also let me know. I'd love to hear all your reactions and ideas.

Thank you so much

snowyday

I think that's rather a good idea. I'd love to see what you come up with.

I like a really complicated board game that requires an hour and a manual in 5 different languages to assemble. The more three dimensional, the better.

Your idea is really cool! Good luck with you!

One element this kind of game should certainly feature are pictures of people showing different facial expressions associated with different emotions. The task would then be to either find the pic best fitting a certain mood or to figure out what emotion is expressed by the face in the picture.

Another aspect could be a kind of "smalltalk training", though I am not sure how that could be incorporated. Maybe a number of quiz cards, each of which holds several possible responses to an introductory statement of which some would be considered appropiate and others would be considered inappropiate by most NTs. The task would then be to discriminate between "good" and "bad" choices for continuing the conversation.
Or the cards could describe different situations and give a choice between several possible reactions one could chose from. Something along the lines of "What would you do if you saw your sibling crying?"

Another aspect you ought to consider while designing this game, snowyday, is whether or not NTs should play the game with people on the spectrum or whether it is an "ASD-only" game. If you go for the first option, I think that forming teams consisting of both NTs and people on the spectrum would face the problem that the NTs find this game too easy and give all the answers without thinking, which would render the game quite useless to the others who would find themselves unable to make a sensible contribution. A better option might be to award points for correct answers and to award more points for the same answer if somebody is on the spectrum than an NT would get in their stead.

If you want to train aspies to recognize facial expressions just force them to play an existing game: poker!

What if it was a game that encompasses all personality types not just Aspie but NTs as well. Like with colored blocks like Trivial Pursuit. With some colors for small talk, logistical, empathy, manners. It would be a great training device to help people understand each other because different personality types would have different answers.

Made me think of the game Guess Who? (link)

Mod it add some facial expressions to it, changeble like they did with bars for eyes, haircut, eyebrows, moustache, lips, chin, etc. just like police sketching (can't come-up with the name for it).

I've done some legwork here I guess, just put a thank you in the credits if it made the wished for leap

Cheerfully,
Wallourdes

Emotional Guess Who! Yeah the current one doesn't have many facial expressions, but a modified version could involve players asking, e.g. "Am I angry?", "Am I excited?". Even if the get it wrong in the end, it would then be open for discussion and they could learn why they were getting some expressions wrong, etc.

I'd go with some sort of tabletop RPG.

When I was younger I'd play the board game "Risk" alot but not in the conventional sense. If I was going to play a board game though, I'd want some sort of RPG on how life is suppose to be. Almost like the board game of Life, except different.. I'd like a cool avatar, the choices of other female avatars to marry, what kind of house, education, etc.. up's and down's. I normally don't like board games since you'd need more than 1 person .. It'd be cool to design a webpage to go along with the board game.. I'm not sure if that's been done before where you'd tie the two together somehow. With the Autistic spectrum, each person is unique and different so it'd haveto branch and extend outside of it aswell, one person might like one thing while others may be completely uninterested. I hate concept's that aren't original. I don't necessarily have a tough time with facial expressions , as I barely look at peoples faces or eyes for that matter. I guess for me it's more of a choice rather than no way of distinguishing weather somebody is sad or angry.. other than that, I can't really think of anything else..

Personally, I like Euro games.

Wow, thank you ever so much for your extremely helpful replies. I'm going to print them all out and when my group meets up again I'll show them what you've said. You've provided some really brilliant ideas, and there are some questions I've got for some of you & I'll work them out in the coming days.

About credits, we won't be publishing it - it's only a task as part of our studies but we'll add all your names onto the bibliography or name list, definitely. Your avatars I suppose then, and of course the name of this forum.

I will keep checking in here each day, and also keep you updated with our game. So far, we're right at the beginning of the project but the deadline's January 20th so we haven't got long and will be working hard on it soon.

Any new comments are welcome too, I'll add them into my folder.


PS
By the way, my niece has just been diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum: I'm not exactly sure of the details because I heard it from my Mum, but I'll speak to my sister soon. My niece won't be joining this forum quite yet though, seeing as she's only 6. She was having a lot of problems at school that's how the assessment came about.