For most teachers who play board games, the question of using them in the classroom is less a matter of whether one should than how one can. They know, almost instinctively, the instructional value of board games but run up against institutional convention. Some teachers occasionally offer games as incentives (post-exam “free” days, for example), some simply start after-school board game clubs, and some intrepid souls begin folding games into their instruction. Many might ask how this can be done, given professional guidelines: academic standards, scope-and-sequence mandates, professional learning communities and lesson planning uniformity, etc. How could any moment of test preparation be spared for something as extraneous as a board game? Or curiosity? Or joy?

Leaving aside the dubious merit of such professional requirements, local administrators will likely question board games in the classroom, if for no other reason than education as a social institution has a long and storied resistance to all meaningful change. Administrators, as representatives of the staid, are trained to question, if not outright reject, the new. Sure, hallway scouts and Fight-Club-level secrecy among students are viable means of playing board games during the school day (and building rapport, I suppose), but this type of underhandedness has the whiff of the illicit, as though playing board games were the equivalent of vaping in the bathroom.…

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