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What can your child learn from board games? Just about anything.

Games are small simulations of real life. Chess, for example, is an ancient board game based on the politics of the battlefield. You can show a child the pieces and ask them which are the most powerful. Perhaps it was irony that made the Queen a more powerful piece than the King or maybe the idea is rooted in truth.

But what is a board game? Operation is a board game. What skills are used to play it? Mostly manual dexterity. The game involves removing comic organs from a cartoon patient avoiding the tell tale electric buzzer that says you've failed. A game that uses similar skills is Jenga - the game where you have to remove blocks of wood from a tower. Now do we call Jenga a board game when it doesn't have a board? Is having a board crucial? Clearly not. A board is just one component of many games. Other components consist of cards, dice, counters and of course rules.

Games with boards teach children about counting. They throw the dice, they count out their turn. Boards can be well designed and they can be badly designed. A badly designed board game will have spaces that are too small when there is more than one counter on the space. Then there will be an argument over which space the counter was on or someones counter will get knocked over.

Dice are central to many games. They produce random numbers. They can teach children about chance. In some games they can teach about risk. And the game that springs to mind immediately is Risk. Risk is a strategy game where the object is to fight battles and conquer the world. From playing Risk a child can learn to calculate the likelihood of a battle being successful.

Rules are what make games, games. Games don't need anything more than a set of rules. But with a board game the rules are written down and that makes an important tool for learning. Rules need to be learned. And rules need to be applied. It's a skill in itself to understand when a rule comes into force. In a simple snakes and ladders game, the rule is that you go up ladders and down snakes. Younger children may not at first understand this rule, concentrating more on moving their counters. An adult supervisor may need to nudge them to remind them to follow the rule. This is something that happens in all games played with younger children. Learning to apply all the rules at all the available opportunities is something that comes with age, concentration and awareness.

There are many other things that

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