Wargames & Fantasy Battles as an Aid to Education

A hugely important aspect for Winter Hill Games, both as a Club and a Business, is promoting the educational benefits of our hobby. As you may know we have developed a number of “Club and Schools Learning Packs” for working with Club members and schools to develop various skills through Wargaming and Fantasy Battles.

In the following series of posts we'd like to share with you why we believe our hobby is a tool with which to practice and develop the learned skills acquired through formal education or develop the inherent abilities of the individual.

Please note that while we do get professional assistance in developing the learning packs no one at Winter Hill Games is from an educational background. We all went to school, heck some made it to tertiary education and most still read... but you know what we mean. ;} Therefore we encourage discussion on our views expressed here. We’ll share more about how we develop our Club and Schools Learning Packs in future posts, for now let’s share our ‘mindset’ with you.

Inherent Abilities and Learned Skills
When playing tabletop Wargames and Fantasy Battles the main things to do are to get immersed in the game, the characters, the situation the battle is at, take a break from the routine and stresses of life, enjoy spending time with like minded friends in a safe and relaxed environment and most importantly just have fun.

The great thing is while doing all of that the player can effortlessly do so much more too;

• Rapidly apply mental arithmetic techniques to perform various calculations to help keep track of define the current state of play and the effects of events during play.

• They use their wider math skills to perform numerical analysis either on the fly or against a collection of data for post game analysis.

• The player can perform situational and strategic analysis that leads to structured and accurate decision making based on both the rules of the game and the context of game play.

• They can practice language and communication skills when they discuss their understanding of the current state of the game play, resolve misunderstandings or negotiate issues.

• They exercise their creative, abstract, imaginative skills when engaging with the game board and characters used for the game as representations of real places, characters and events.

• The player will constantly apply reading and comprehension skills understanding the game lore, relationships between characters in the various armies, their background, etc.

All of this takes place fairly unnoticed for the most part and yet each is a significant skill that if practiced and developed will benefit the player greatly outside of the context of the hobby. The skills are highly transferrable to other hobbies, activities and of course the workplace.

In the next part...
How do these skills get applied in practice? By way of example let’s look at some key things the player does and how the above skills come into play.