Shut Up and Move: The Uses of Board Games in Child Psychotherapy

Nine-and-a-half-year-old Richard and I are in the playroom for one of our first few sessions together. He rapidly and almost haphazardly touches several different toys as he moves around the room. He finally settles on the sand table. He hands us dinosaurs, taking the biggest ones for himself, and buries them all the way to their heads in the sand outside the fort he has built. They are pet dinosaurs, he says, but if they get hungry they will bite even us. We will attack them at dawn, while they sleep. Next there are spacemen in the sand, and monsters. His characters are the toughest and strongest; mine need advice on fort-building. Our men fight, die, and come back to life as it quickly becomes “the next century.” At the end of the session, after begging for “just a little longer” to play, Richard pockets a tiny monster and leaves the room.

Wait! This paper is supposed to be about board games! That was a story of dramatic play, not a board game.

It is a scene familiar to most child therapists; young children play out their fantasies and conflicts in symbolic play like this every day. Most therapists are comfortable attempting interpretations about this kind of play. They see the difficulty Richard has in structuring his play, as he moves rapidly from one toy to the next, changing the characters of his stories in the middle. They see the scary monsters he identifies everywhere: in the house, under the sand, from outer space. They see the family pet that turns dangerous even toward loved ones if it becomes too needy, and the aggressive orality of that neediness. They see the phallic competition for biggest and best, which he wins for himself, needing to see himself as bigger and stronger