Day by Day

A long time ago I designed a board game.  I was taking a class in my graduate program entitled "Teaching Health Professionals," and one of the assignments was to create and present a teaching project for the class.

I wanted to raise awareness of what it was like to live with a chronic mental illness, and thought that a game would be a good way to do this.  Obviously, I had some literature that backed up using games to impact the "affective domain of learning," which essentially means impacting attitudes of the learners.

The game had a track that snaked around the board with numbers randomly assigned.  There was a second board showing six different "health and function" tracks.  These tracks showed each player's status in Self Esteem, Mental Status, Relationships, Physical Health, Housing, and Job.   These tracks were number lines, going from 1-40.

To play, each team would place their movement pawn anywhere they wanted on the board, and a pawn on the number 30 for each of the Health and Function tracks.  The start player would roll a die, move the number of spaces on the board, and call out the number of the space landed on.  Someone would refer to the reference book and read the event associated with that number.  The results would impact some or all of the Health and Function tracks in some way.  Most events would drop one or more statuses in some way.

Play continued like this until one of the tracks dropped to 10 or lower.  Then the player would be in "Crisis." There was a separate section of events for being in Crisis.  If two tracks dropped to 10, the player would be in the psych hospital, and would use the events from the Hospitalization section of the results booklet.

I used this with a couple of different groups, all nurses in my grad program, and people loved it.  It really prompted some great discussions, and I think it was successful at helping people understand chronic mental illness a little differently.  Then I filed it away at the end of the semester and forgot about it.

Recently I found the event booklet in a box of things I was sorting through.  That gave me the idea to revive it, and over the past few weeks I completely updated the game.  Instead of a single status board with everyone's pawns on the same tracks, there are now individual player boards, one for each player.  Instead of three sections in a reference book, there are three decks of cards, all revised to reflect events I'm familiar with from working with people in the community over the past 11 years.  Instead of a randomly numbered board and a die, the movement board is a six-week calendar.  Players move one space at a time and draw a card from the appropriate deck.  They move one day at a time.  A lot like how so many of my clients live...Day by Day.  Which is now the new name for my game.

I made two copies today, complete with wooden cubes to track status and wooden meeples to move through the calendar.  I wrote up the rules and discussion guidelines last week.  It's ready to play.  I'll be using it this week with my students, and the week after that with the group of newly graduated nurses on orientation at the hospital.  I can't wait to finally have this as a teaching tool!