Study: Why Autistic People Love Board Games

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ABOUT: Rebecca Watson is the founder of the Skepchick Network, a collection of sites focused on science and critical thinking. She has written for outlets such as Slate, Popular Science, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. She's also the host of Quiz-o-tron, a rowdy, live quiz show that pits scientists against comedians. Asteroid 153289 Rebeccawatson is named after her (her real name being 153289).

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[carriepoppy]

::BOUNDS INTO THE ROOM, SCREAMING:: DIAGNOSED WITH AUTISM MARCH 2024 AT UCLA!

No one likes to say it this plainly (autistic people generally hate oversimplifications), but the reality is that for most of us, unstructured socializing just isn't fun. This comes up in study after study. It's obvious and it's fine! Unstructured socializing is anxiety-provoking for me for several neurological reasons that have nothing to do with workaholism or self-judgment, though they can look like that to the uninitiated. When you have that situation going on, and you're my phenotype, you find a way to keep your friends by structuring your socializing so you all work toward something together, or next to one another. It's a lovely thing, and IMO a perfect solution. It's also a great argument for always involving a game at a party simply to be accessible to more people. But I agree with others here that it is the GAME aspect, not the BOARD GAME aspect, that's most relevant.

And for me, personally, because I am hyperlexic (my language processing is exceptional but my spacial processing is comparatively very poor), written rules must be clear, exact, and language-based. A diagram will mean nearly nothing to me unless someone points to it and spells out what seems obvious.

the nerds: dx at UCLA Semel Institute, Type 1, 99/60 v/s,

[sojabursche]

Non disabled/non autistic people always seem so surprised that we are really good at socialising among ourselves as soon as we have a reason to want to do it and don’t get policed by allistic and non-disabled people.
Also I was misdiagnosed as having generalised anxiety for 14 years before getting my autism diagnosis, so might be worth it to look into it just to know. It can help with sensory stuff and being more at home in yourself and the world. Knowing I’m autistic helped a lot with my anxiety, because a lot of it was sensory issues I didn’t recognise for what it was and trauma from allistic people policing my behaviour all my life.

[chibinyra]

As an AuDHD I am betting it is because of a clear set of rules.
But I also hate competition and what it brings out in people, so I am all for Co-Ops

[hiigguys]

You want a co-op? I also play boardgames with my husband most nights and largely co-ops. Here are our favorites. For first time play, I'd add about 50% to game play time. All work great from 2-4 unless said otherwise:

Spirit Island - A game where you are these spirits on a a Polynesian island and you have to kill or scare off the invading colonizers before they destroy the island. I like it most with two because a 4 hour game is a bit much of this for me. It's about an hour per player. Each spirit has their own unique powers that make you all radically different to play as, leading to many many hours of variable game play. This is our most played game. I know I have played this over 150 times.

Gloomhaven (I recommend starting with the Jaws of the Lion expansion) - You are a team of adventures in a fantasy world and each game is a dungeon crawl. At about 45 minutes per player, it is a campaign based game where you play through a story, level up your characters, which like Spirit Island, are each unique and lead to radically different game play. Gloomhaven and Frosthaven are really big and expensive as they both have over a 100 missions, which is why I recommend starting with Jaws of the Lion which only has 25.

Daybreak - Made from the people who made Pandemic, but instead at saving the world from disease, it's climate change! About 30 minutes per player. All the game play pieces are biodegradable.

Mysterium - About 1-2 hours, not per player. Mix Clue with Dixit and you have this game. One player has died and they can only communicate to the other players (the mediums) through trippy vision cards to tell them who killed them, where, and with what. They must solve the case! Not a two player game though. This one is great for up to 7.

Arkham Horror (the card game, not the boardgame) - A Magic the Gathering like deck-builder, but again, you play through a story with characters with unique powers. This one can get pricey, but also, buy only as many campaigns as you want to play. A campaign is about 8 games, though the very first one released had 3. The game will often have choices that changes the direction of the story leading to replay-ability, but not as much as the others. About 40- minutes a player.

The Crew - By far the shortest at about 5 minutes a round, this is a trick taking game where you trying to lose and win tricks as a group and you have to learn how to read your friends. Not as good for two players but great in groups of about 4.

The Mind - Like the crew in that you have to read your teammates and each game is a round, but even more so. Everyone gets some cards with numbers. Place them in order in the table. Don't talk. If they aren't in order, you lose.

Pandemic Legacy - If you like Pandemic and end up liking a campaign based game, this exists. Play 12-24 games of Pandemic, but the rules and map changes from game to game. You put a lot of stickers on the board. No replay-ability. I think this is best with 4 players because of it's lack of replay-ability and wanting most bang for your buck.

I loved playing every single one of these games.

[louise]

Hating board games as an autistic person is the hard mode of making friends 😮‍💨

[BrotherAlpha]

Two stories:

1.) We like to get together and play board games during the holidays. My mom will always ask to play, "That game where you get drunk and punch each other." and it is our tradition to say, "Monopoly?" "NO! The game where your characters get drunk and punch each other." (It's Red Dragon Inn in case anyone was curious.)

2.) In university, my sister met a group of men who played a monthly game of Axis and Allies and had since high school. They had NEVER finished a game. Not once. They had had multiple games end with a broken nose. They were still friends after all of this... somehow.

[EmmaMaySeven]

"They reported comfort engaging with a known set of rules which don't change unexpectedly."

I'm not autistic, but really feel this. So many times I discover that somebody wanted Y but indicated X just to be cute and thought I would know they wanted Y.

[fotnite_]

I'm autistic and not really that into board games in particular, but I do find that board games and card games do usually make socializing easier. I'd like to add that both the points about consistent rules and making socializing easier is similar to the reason I play a lot of video games that are either mainly online (such as TF2) or have a strong online community (such as Dark Souls), so I think the study is onto something when it comes to using special interests as a social lubricant.

[maicydownton]

My husband destroyed me at one of my favorite games, Dominion. On my birthday. Rebecca you are smart to do the co-ops! My favorite co-op is Frosthaven (and/or Gloomhaven) but I also really enjoyed Pandemic Legacy with my husband. Something about the legacy version made it so much more fun.

[briannacluck]

one final comment: I used to work at an intermediate care facility, which is when I learned about the field of Therapeutic Recreation. A lot of rec therapy is things like this. You use fun activities or social functions and, because it's something actually engaging, it helps people work on physical and mental or social skills in a way that a strictly clinical setting often can't. Learning to pick up marbles and place them in a tray can help with fine motor skills or learning how to work with numb fingers, for example, but playing Uno with your friends can also do it in a way that has a clear goal: I wanna play uno with the homies, so I'll trial and error my way i to figuring out a way to hold my cards and play them to the top of the discard pile.

Unfortunately, when rubber meets the road some therapeutic recreation programs lose sight of that, or they aren't empowered to work to their full potential. It can be hard to explain to someone that you're not slacking off at work when you are playing Phase 10 with a few people on the clock, even though that's a game that requires fine and gross motor control, planning ahead, rules memorization, abstract pattern thinking and voice volume control

[retrokittydesign]

I observed so much of the benefits of gaming for autistic people when I opened my game store. I self diagnosed at 51 and gaming in my family was one of the clues I had.

[GailGurman]

I'm not autistic, but I love playing board games. I used to be a member of a group that met every week to play board games, and this group comprised most of my closest friends. That is to say, I met them there and we socialized over board games. I don't know who, if anyone, was autistic but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some.

Eventually I moved to a different city and the best I could find was a couple of people who occasionally hosted game nights in their homes. These were fun but I didn't make any deep friendships there. Now I live in a relatively small city and I still haven't found a board game group, but a couple of years ago I joined my first D&D group. It's a very friendly group and has included several autistic children and adults.

So this makes me wonder: I know there was something in there about the study subjects not liking storytelling games, but maybe they should try TTRPGs with a similar group. Also, they definitely need a control group of people not diagnosed with autism. A lot of the things they said would seem to apply to everyone.

[AlonAltman]

You are not Autistic? I am shocked.

As far as co-op games go, try Spirit Island. It's about working with the indigenous population on protecting an island from evil white invaders wanting to plunder the land. It's awesome, though quite a step up in complexity compared to pandemic and codenames (which if you haven't, you should probably play codenames duet for co-op).

[ShakespeareDoomsday]

Stardew Valley’s co-op mode is surprisingly more stressful than single player because the time continues through the day unless the whole game is paused. Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a great video game that’s primarily geared toward co-op playing and has roles for more and less experienced players (most experienced should drive, least should shoot, mid should control the shield if there are 4 players). Hanabi is a fun co-op card game in which the players can see everyone else’s cards but not their own and they have to help each other figure out their cards with minimal information, but it’s really confusing without at least one seasoned player.

[isaacseavello]

Ooh ooh board game recommendations! I have complicated feelings about co-op board games, I love the idea of them but I have found most of them are a miss for me, they often end up turning into the most experienced player leading everyone else to the finish line. With that said, these two are not only my two favorite co-op games, but among my top 5 board games of all time:

Mysterium - 2-7 players (though you have to jump through some hoops to get the 2 player version to work) Mysterium is like clue, where you are trying to guess who the murderer is, where they did it, and with what weapon. Except instead of it being one of the players, one player is the ghost of the victim, and everyone else is a psychic detective, working together to find the culprit from among the cards in the middle. And instead of moving pieces around a board (the worst part of clue tbh) the ghost’s job is to pass out abstract vision cards to each player to indicate the card they want them to pick. For example, the ghost may pass out a card of a suit of armor resting inside the sand of an hourglass, set against a bed of roses, and the players together work to interpret what that could mean. Was it the gardener? Maybe the military general? I adore this game and honestly don’t play it enough.

Hanabi - 2-5 players. Hanabi fits the bill of a small game I can bring somewhere, and both of these games fit the bill of games that I can play with people who “don’t really play board games”. In Hanabi, you are working together to build a fireworks display by playing cards from a deck. The cards are numbered 1-5 in each of 5 suits, and you want to play them in order, so you can’t play the green 2 until someone plays the green 1, for example. The catch is, you hold your hand /backwards/ and never get to see what you have in your hand, so the game is about trying to get people the information they need to play their hand. But the only things you can say about each others hands are limited, if you are giving a hint you can only point out either all of a number in their hand or all of a color in their hand. You win as long as you make it through the deck, which is pretty easy to do, but you get scored based on how many cards you were able to play, and getting a high score is extremely hard!

[kittycatcitycat]

I'm autistic with anxioty problems reselting. When organizing my birthday parties as a kid, I quickly discovered that what was blissful for me was for all of my guests to sit arround the table and do a craft, except when actually engaged in eating the birthday meal or watching present opening. People had a thing to focus on besides eating and taking, so I got to see their creative expression, and connect socially without the pressure of trying to get all my fullfillment and success at the parties from using my social skills well -- that's always been too stressful to work well for me in in the way it usually does for those who enjoy unstructured "munch-and-yak-style" parties. 2 basic computer games, one narrative based and one puzzle based also allowed an easy structure for me to do a thing with a friend I got very close to for a long time. Sitting in front of a screen together isn't active social time in the same way, but it similarly makes it possible to not be bored or forced in interactions, so that you can invite someone over frequently enough to count as a friend, and yet not need to pull yourself out of yourself for someone to concect with, when the right ways to do that socially just don't flow out of you, as they more often seem to for people who do well socially or wouldn'tplay a game.
Also, the point of small talk is to interact well, even when you don't have anything particular of importance to focus on and enjoy it. Games, with their absurd scripts for interaction, allow you to do the same without having to nagotiate that social script entirely seriously out of a consensus of gathered social imformation being put out by everyone. I often find that, even talking with one or a very few people, the pressure of doing that well when everyone's entirely focused on that takes so much energy that, before the end of conversing, I forget the reallymeaningful and important social imformation that is the deeper point of these conversations -- making thing flow in the moment can just take too much. So games are useful for that, but I'm also just a big fan of exploring, creating or more generally doing a thing with people whenever I can manage to when I socialize. Eating, particularly the free munching of finger foods that goes on at most adult parties, is uniquely bad for this. There's seldommuch conversation fodder in the food itself, and, if you try to use the food table as a focus and stress reliever, that generally leads to eating more food than you should and more food you don't even care to eat that much, to keep your stressed hands busy. I suppose this is my best argument for bringing knitting, macreme and similar simple crafts to get-togethers to keep me feeling okay when I just wish to be easy and silent.

[GutsyTen]

Recently diagnosed autistic and I love board games arguably a bit too much. Though for a favorite co-op can I suggest burgle bros? It's a heist board game that'll make you feel like you're in oceans eleven

[AutiSam]

I'm Autistic and also have ADHD, I struggle with board games because one of my strongest traits is difficulty with attention and working memory. So if I can play board games with people who dont mind me being slow to grasp the rules and losing the thread all the time thats cool, but hardcore Autistic board game fans tend not to be like that so much. I do find that socialising works much better for me when there is a shared activity, but for me that would be riding bikes, climbing trees, splashing about in rivers etc rather than board games or cards. I did love Steve Jackson/Ian Livingstone fighting fantasy books as a kid, anyone remember those? Maybe just a UK thing. They were single-player so if I went off into a daydream during the game it wasnt a problem, in fact that was part of the fun.

[steveng.clinard]

As a wise man once said, "I like board games more than most people"

By which they meant both that they like board games more than most people do, and also that they like board games more than they like most people.

[clintonjeffrey]

ASD and BG enthusiast. Gloomhaven, Earthborne Rangers, Mage Knight, Sleeping Gods, and The Grizzled have all been in my collection for years and get lots of play.