Games to Try and Games to Avoid for Multicultural Groups
Image credit: Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels
I’ve always loved board games.
Granted, I grew up at a time where electronic entertainment had limits it doesn’t have today—hello Atari and television that “went off the air” after the national anthem at a certain time of night—yet board games had a solid role in our family interactions and in my playtime with friends and cousins.
As an adult, I’ve even had periods during which I’ve hosted semiregular board-game nights with groups of friends at home.
I had, in fact, half a closet dedicated to board games, which I could pull from at the first opportunity to play.
However, when Arnaud and I became a couple, I realized with a bit of surprise (how had I been so clueless?) that most of the board games I owned and regularly played gave me an unfair cultural advantage. The “cultural knowledge” games used information only culturally known by people who lived in the United States at a certain time. Other games relied on having a native-level knowledge of U.S. English as well, either due to spelling and vocabulary or even slang and terminology.
Because turnabout is fair play, I faced the same challenge from the flip side during holidays and vacations in France with Arnaud’s family.
To see how it feels—as I did—try playing French Trivial Pursuit as a U.S. American. The “general knowledge” questions come from the French educational curriculum, French pop culture, and French cultural heritage.
Information that everyone around the table considered easy-peasy, I had never heard of before. Further, movies and television series—even ones originally from the United States—don’t have the same names in French. (For example, “Jaws” is called “Les Dents de la Mer” in French. Oh, and the Disney characters Chip ‘n’ Dale? In France, they call them Tic and Tac. For some unknown-to-me reason.)
How about trying French Scrabble as a U.S. American?
The allocation of letters and their value in French Scrabble don’t match up with the U.S. version, because the French language uses letters in different amounts and in different ways. Further, the clever words the French can find in French among random assortments of tiles, as native speakers, will vastly outmatch anything you can generate.
Over time, Arnaud’s family clearly started to pity the idiot he’d married and offered to help me, saying that every time my turn arrived, as long as someone in the group could answer the question correctly, they’d give me the points.
Humiliating. Yet, in their places, I’d have thought me an idiot, too, for my cluelessness on seemingly “obvious” things.
Though we could easily avoid board games before the coronavirus crisis, the confinement pressed the limits of watching series and movies together or reading and working separately. I started seeking games that would give no one a cultural- or language-related handicap.
Turns out, great games for multicultural groups abound, if you know what to avoid and what to seek. A good thing, as games provide a wonderful way to get to know new people. What better than to have a set of resources to relax with friends and family from a variety of backgrounds—and to meet and get to know multicultural people?
Games to Avoid with Multicultural Groups—and Why
Scan the list below for a quick review of games to avoid with multicultural and multilingual groups if you want to equalize the playing field and ensure everyone has a good time:
Scrabble, Boggle, and other word-play games: Even for people fluent in other languages, these games require a plasticity of language understanding, a creative flexibility with word breakdowns (e.g., you can make “underwhelming” into “under,” “whelm,” and “helm”), and access to unusual vocabulary that give native speakers unfair (and frustrating) advantage.
Trivial Pursuit (all editions) and other trivia-related games: See my story above about trying to play French Trivial Pursuit for context here. We learn what our schools consider general knowledge and we steep in the general cultural knowledge of our own times and places. Further, the terms for even seemingly “common ground” items may not be the same in different cultures and languages. People from different cultures can’t compete.
Apples to Apples, Words with Friends, and similar games: I adore these games, as I find it thrilling to put new combinations of words and terms together. However, you can’t expect a nonnative speaker to play these types of games well—which becomes even more true when these word-play games require an understanding of nuanced slang, a grasp of the multiple levels of many words’ and terms’ meanings, and innuendo of the innocent and not-so-innocent kind.
Charades and games with similar characteristics: Think someone can guess a song or a movie or a character or an actor that they’ve never encountered? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shocked the French by never having heard of some actor or singer that they consider a canon-level classic. Avoid these types of culture-based guessing games unless you want to disappoint and frustrate the entire party.
I’ll inevitably end up somewhere and discover yet another game or type of game that doesn’t work for someone coming from another background and language—and I’ll update this list as I do.
Games for All Cultures and Languages
Duos and groups mixing native languages and cultures can play these games without any handicaps or unfair advantages:
Card games using standard card decks, like poker, gin rummy, and war: Card decks may have slight differences in other cultures—for example, in France, the “queen” is the “dame,” so the Q on the card corner is a D. However, across all cultures, the picture of a queen on a standard card deck is still obviously a queen. And so forth. Everyone can follow along after a quick orientation.
Chess, checkers, backgammon (the eternal classics): People have played versions of these games almost as long as recorded history and across vast geographies, attesting to their viability across times, cultures, and languages.
Uno: Though this game may have a word or two on the cards, game play doesn’t require much linguistic context and relies most heavily on colors and symbols. Uno is an easy—and easily packable—option for groups from all backgrounds and even ages.
Risk: Different countries have different versions of this game, but they all involve trying to capture territories mapped on a game board using tokens, dice, and graphical cards. No language or cultural knowledge required.
Monopoly (all versions): Some people love it, some people hate it, but the classic game of Monopoly has no basis in general knowledge, language ability, or cultural understanding.
Sorry: People of all ages and all backgrounds can play this simple game involving dice, cards, and squares on a board. Turns out the game makers even based Sorry on an ancient Indian game called Pachisi, further attesting to its cross-cultural flexibility.
Mastermind: Combine pegs of different colors using deductive logic to determine which pegs your opponent has placed behind a protective barrier. With Mastermind, as with the next game on this list, you don’t even need a shared language to play and have fun.
Battleship: In this strategy and guessing game, two players try to determine where the other person has placed its fleets of ships. Place your ships to start the game and then call out guesses back and forth until one of you sinks all the other person’s battleships.
Clue: This simple yet fun game of deduction requires players to be the first to correctly determine who committed a crime, where, and how. You don’t even really need the ability to pronounce the names of the characters, the weapons, and the rooms—you can just point.
Carcassonne: The newest game on this list, Carcassone became an instant classic when it launched in 2000. Players use a series of tiles and pawns to control the most lucrative parts of a medieval landscape. The player with the most points after the group has deployed all tiles wins the game.
The quest continues! I’ll add to this list as I discover more options.
Sharing the Cross-Cultural Adventures
Got a funny story to share about missing something during an “obvious” game in another culture or language? Please share it—it’ll make me feel better about my own humiliation in trying board games in another country and language.
And if you have suggestions for other games to add to the “avoid” or “consider” lists, I’d love to hear them as well.
Side note: Love stories about surprise cultural encounters (especially from a U.S. American in France)? Check out my article about the meaning behind the phrase “who cut the cheese?” and my experience trying to learn French during a time of face masks. (Fun fun, let me tell you.)