This is a terrific game! It doesn’t involve money per se but it teaches youngsters about the productive use of land and resources and how to use the wealth generated to build roads and communities. There is also a newer Trump game called The Apprentice which teaches young people how to be successful project managers, but I haven’t tried it yet. It’s a fast-paced game and my children always enjoyed it. The currency features the face of - who else? - Donald Trump. The potential learning features are similar to those of Monopoly. The players can wheel and deal for millions of dollars, auction properties, and force sales.
Here, the idea is to acquire various glamorous properties, such as a casino, sports complex, hotel, tropical island, airline, and convention centre. The game is best suited to children over age nine. But it’s a good way to learn about how the stock market works and introduces such concepts as dividends, share splits, and valuations. It hasn’t been updated since, as far as I can tell, and there is nothing sexy about the board or the tokens. This one has been around for a long time - I played it back in the 1940s when I was young. Life isn’t always fair.Īlthough Monopoly is the classic financial game, there are others that are worth considering. You can play well and still lose because the dice don’t roll your way.
There are several money and life lessons that can be taught through Monopoly (although don’t turn every game into a series of lectures, the idea is to have fun). Together, they had gained control of all the cheap properties on the strip between Go and Jail, carefully invested their money in houses and hotels, and then waited until we landed on them and were dinged with huge rents. In the end, my six-year-old granddaughter, who was playing on the same team as her mom, emerged as the winner. She and I reinforced that lesson as the game progressed: You have to take some risks if you hope to succeed. We paused for a few minutes while his mother explained that was because he had not invested in any houses for his properties. Electronic games won’t work - the kids are isolated and there is no opportunity for parental interaction.įor example, in the middle of our Monopoly game my grandson became excited by the fact he had more cash in his account than any of the other players. To me, that’s a great place to start.īut it has to be a board game, where you’re all sitting around a table together. However, I don’t recall anything in the Task Force’s report about using board games to introduce children to the concepts of finance. Thanks in part to the work done by the federal government’s Task Force on Financial Literacy, we’re becoming increasingly sensitized to the fact that many Canadians don’t understand the most basic principles of money management. I’ve always enjoyed Monopoly but I have come to realize in recent years what a valuable tool it and similar games can be in helping teach kids the basics of finance and investing. The railroads have become Space, Cruise, Rail, and Air transportation centres. Instead of utilities like Electric Company and Water Works, we bought Solar Energy and Wind Energy. We moved our tokens (based on each of the six continents) around a board which featured world cities like Montreal and Taipei in place of Boardwalk and Baltic Ave. My nine-year-old grandson acted as banker, inserting our cards into an electronic banking unit to record purchases, rent payments, passing Go bonuses, tax payments, and the like. This is a sleek new 21st century version where properties cost millions of dollars and you use a debit/credit card for transactions instead of paper money. But it wasn’t the old Monopoly that I remembered. The other day I played a game of Monopoly with two of my grandchildren and their mom.