Board Game

Below are some things that we view as the biggest advantages of board games.

• They are easy to carry around or change. It’s just some papers. Maybe just some rules in your head. And if you don’t like a specific card? Or fear that a student won’t understand it? Just leave it out of the game! You can’t do that with video games.
• They are social experiences. Those are crucial for everyone’s development and mental health. You’re not playing alone, or sweating over homework alone, you’re doing an activity together. Even better if it’s a cooperative game and you actually work together as a team.
• They are offline. Away from the screen. Tactile, physical experiences in the real world.
• They allow expansions. We always make the base game as simple as possible. Read rules for 5 minutes, instantly play. But we also offer many expansions to change the game, make it harder, keep it interesting for a while (once players understand the base game).

And, perhaps most importantly,

• They allow you to play with a system. Everything in the world is a system, such as the climate or the economy. Games allow you to be the system, to actually sit inside of it and tweak things to help you win. It’s the best way to learn deep knowledge on specific topics.
• They are the form of entertainment with the best “bang-for-your-buck”. A single game might cost ~10 euros, once. And then you can play it with 4 people, as many times as you want, each game taking an hour. In the end you’ll realize you spent less than a cent per minute of entertainment.

Research has shown that the vast majority of people enjoy cooperative offline games the most. It’s simply our most natural mode of play. Not too much pressure, no skill with a gamepad required, and you get good vibes from working together (“against the game”). A board game, as long as its theme is interesting and its rules very simple, is absolutely the best way to provide fun (and learning) to any group.

• If you’re unable to spend the time playing with your children/students. You simply can’t play most board games alone! And even if you can, a guide to read the rules is obviously necessary for those who can’t read yet.
• If you struggle to read and remember rules. We work hard to simplify our games as much as possible, getting their rules down to a single page. Still, even that requires some effort to read/understand/explain before you can play. (More effort, at least, than, say, watching a film.)
• If you can’t print the games or can’t spend the time preparing the material. Even the simplest games will require some things to print and cut out.
• If you prefer video games. There are many similarities between board games and video games, but also enough crucial differences that not every “gamer” enjoys both of them equally much.

We focus on simple and minimalist games (at most 1 page of rules, 1 minute of setup, only several pages of material). To prevent making it simplistic, however, we usually add a single well-designed twist to make them interesting for kids and adults alike. After ten years of making games simpler, shorter and more streamlined, we have the 1-page-rulebook down to a science.

We focus on clever games, not homework or lots of reading. The games simulate something in real life and teach how that works. Sure, you could force a child to read ten pages about the Roman Empire. You could also design a game in which they live inside the Roman Empire, or run a part of it, and have fun while gaining a far deeper understanding of it.

Because of our focus on educational games for all ages, they will usually be textless, short, and family friendly too. The core of the game is something anyone can understand, and communication happens through icons/colors/shapes. Once in a while, we break this trend to go all-out on a really thematic, colorful, immersive game, which is usually reflected by their price tag and marketing ;)

Our biggest asset, however, is our broad knowledge of what games can be. How we can apply proven ideas and mechanics to do away with any hurdles standing between (young/inexperienced) players and new board games.

These games are “print and play”. It means that you receive one or more PDF files including rules and material to print and cut out. In the future, we hope to sell proper physical versions of our best games too, but for many complicated reasons this is more of a long-term dream now.

Because of how we design games, you usually get a lot of bonus material too. Expansions. Variants. Suggestions or tools for how to modify the game to fit your group or your goals better.

Rules are not set in stone. Slight tweaks on the same core game idea can take a game from “meh” to “really effective” for specific playing groups. We acknowledge and accomodate this. We have played so many games with so many different groups/types of players that we learned there is no one way to play any game, and there should not be. Games are more … fluid than that. Just like learning should be dynamic and mold itself around the one doing the learning.

In the rare case we create an expansion or extra work for a board game after releasing it, we’ll just update the files and you get these improvements for free.

We are working on a system that allows interactive rulebooks and material generators, like the one we created for Pandaqi. It would allow pressing a button to see a random turn of the game, which is a faster and better way to learn the rules. It would allow customizing the material yourself. It’s not available yet, but future games will hopefully include this.

You always get a ZIP file. When extracted, it contains,

• A PDF with the illustrated rulebook.
• (MAYBE) An interactive rulebook. It simply means you can open it in the browser and click images/buttons to get dynamic examples.
• A PDF with the material.
• (MAYBE) A “generator” for the game. Open it in the browser, pick your settings, and it generates new material for you according to your wishes.

Sometimes the PDFs for the material or rulebook are split into multiple files. This usually means one PDF is for the base game and the others are for optional expansions. This allows you to print/read only what matters to you now and leave the rest for later.

Board games are where it all started—and where it all leads.

I started playing board games long, long ago. I started designing them not long after. Before I knew it, I had my Pandaqi Games website with ~100 free printable board games. They are responsible for urging me to learn graphic design, clear communication, rules simplification, researching the psychology of fun, and more.

At the same time, they are by far the best educational tool we have. This online store contains many other categories, but those are all “stepping stones”. I want people to eventually end up here, at board games, and use those to have fun and learn skills.

The objective was to give every school topic at least one board game. As it stands, we have at least 5–10 ideas for board games about school topics for every topic. Over time, we hope to finish them all, and we hope you try them and experience their educational prowess!