Additional Needs

Bored in hospital? Bring out the board games

Posted by Carolyn Voisey on 16th November 2020 Additional Needs, Advice & Support, Disabilities

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Generally speaking, hospital stays tend to consist of a lot of waiting.

There’s the usual routine of observations, blood tests, and so on but mostly its all about waiting.

And if you happen to be on a long hospital stay, it can sometimes feel like it will never end. Its no fun for anyone.

Currently, we are in one such long hospital stay.

As the Dudes issues are many and varied, there genuinely is no end in sight while we work towards understanding what exactly is going on, and how best to deal with it to give him the best possible quality of life.

He would probably argue that staring at the ceiling of his room in HDU is NOT high on his list of enjoyable pass times, so as we are instructed to get him into his wheelchair as often as possible to help his chest we have become something of a family of officionado’s on suitable portable games for hospital.

As a family of board game fanatics, we have quite a range of games to select from when it comes to hospital entertainment – although some of the larger games aren’t exactly suited to the lack of space frequently encountered, there are a lot of smaller games which serve their purpose perfectly while fitting onto a narrow over-the-bed hospital table!

Roll for It is one such game. The players roll six dice in the hopes of matching the numbers shown on a set of cards, e.g. one card may require a 2 and a 5, while another requires six 4’s. Each card has a points value, at the end of the game the player with the highest score wins. As the game uses cards and dice, its easily portable and comes in a handy little tin.

Mr V recently picked up a tiny game, in a pack not much larger than a pack of playing cards, called Deep Sea Adventure, by Oink games.

This incredibly clever little game is played over three rounds, is wonderfully infuriating and is simple to learn and to play.

A larger game that is a current Sam favourite is Ice Team, where you play polar bears racing from one end of a water channel to the other collecting fish on the way; for those who fancy a collaborative game where you play as a team, we really can’t recommend Forbidden Island enough (although a little more detailed, so better for older children rather than younger ones).

Ensuring that we make time to play a game together while Sam is in hospital helps all of us keep our spirits up, especially on these longer visits when all our usual routines are gone to the wall.

Even if you’ve not really been interested in board games, I can definitely recommend giving them a try.