You Don’t Have to Be a Game Person
Author: Sean Smith, Resident in Counseling
Why Board Game Therapy might be exactly what you didn’t know you were looking for
There is a question I get asked more than any other when people hear the words Board Game Therapy for the first time.
It is not “what games do you play?” or “is this covered by insurance?” or even “do I need to be good at games?”
It is simpler than all of those. It is usually said with a kind of cautious half-laugh, the laugh of someone who is genuinely curious and does not want to get their hopes up.
The question is: “Is this actually a thing?”
Yes. It is actually a thing. And if you have been feeling like something is missing, like your weeks are full but something in them is hollow, like you have plenty of people in your life but not enough people who actually know you, then this particular thing might be worth an evening of your time.
What Board Game Therapy Is
Board Game Therapy is not group therapy with a game in the corner. It is not a board game club with a clinical-sounding name. It sits in the space between those two things, which turns out to be a space that most people did not know existed and that, once they have spent an evening in it, they have trouble explaining why they did not find it sooner.
Here is the simplest version: we gather around a table, we play games together, and something happens in the playing that does not happen in most other places available to adults on a Friday evening.
People relax. Not the performed relaxation of a work happy hour where everyone is still managing their impression. Actual relaxation. The kind that comes from having something specific to focus on that is not yourself, not your week, not the list of things you are supposed to be doing. The game provides the focus. The people around the table provide the rest.
What the research on this is finding, and there is genuine research on this, is that the specific combination of shared stakes, structured interaction, and low-risk social engagement that a game creates produces outcomes that most adult social environments cannot replicate. Reduced loneliness. Improved mood. The particular satisfaction of having been genuinely present with other people for a few hours rather than simply in the same room as them.
We are living through a loneliness epidemic. That is not a metaphor or an exaggeration. The U.S. Surgeon General named it a public health crisis in 2023 and linked chronic social isolation to mortality risks comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The structures that used to bring people together without requiring them to work at it, the bowling leagues, the community halls, the neighborhood gathering places where you became known to someone over time without making it a project, have been quietly disappearing for thirty years.
The table is one answer to that disappearance. It is not the only answer. But it is a real one, and it is available every Friday and Saturday evening, and you do not have to bring anything except yourself and the willingness to sit down.
What Happens When You Walk In
The room will not look like a your typical therapy office (although you will walk past some along the way). There will be tables and chairs around them and games stacked in boxes at the side and the particular atmosphere of a space that has been prepared for people to arrive and stay awhile.
You will not be asked to introduce yourself to the group and share one interesting fact about yourself. You will not be given a name tag with a prompt on it. You will not be asked to check in about your week or your feelings or what you are hoping to get out of the evening.
You will be asked if you want to play a game.
That is the entry point. A game. Something with rules and pieces and an outcome that matters for the duration of the session and then resets, taking none of the stakes with it when it goes. Something that gives you a reason to be at the table and a reason to stay and a reason to look at the person across from you as a collaborator or an opponent or simply as another person who showed up tonight and decided, the same way you did, that this was worth trying.
The games we play are not complicated. You do not need prior experience. You do not need to be strategic or competitive or naturally good at figuring out rules. Every game gets explained before it is played, and the explanation is given by people who remember what it was like to hear it for the first time.
Some nights the table is cooperative: everyone working together against the game itself, winning and losing as a group, which turns out to produce a specific quality of connection that competition does not. Some nights there is negotiation, trading, the good-natured tension of people who are technically rivals but need each other to get anywhere. Some nights there is laughter of the specific kind that comes from a game doing something absurd at exactly the wrong moment, and that laughter is one of the most reliably therapeutic things I know how to produce in a room full of people.
You will find a game you like. You will find one you do not like and that is also fine. The variety is the point. Different games reveal different things, about the people around you and about yourself, and the revelation is always more interesting than the score.
Who This Is For
This is the part where I want to be direct, because the people who need this most are often the people who talk themselves out of trying it.
This is for you if you have recently moved to a new city and your social world has not yet rebuilt itself around your new life, and you are beginning to suspect it will not rebuild itself without some deliberate help.
This is for you if you work from home and your days are full of screens and the particular loneliness of being constantly connected and rarely seen.
This is for you if you are between things, between relationships, between jobs, between the life you had and the one you are trying to build, and the between is quieter than you expected.
This is for you if your social anxiety makes unstructured social situations feel like more work than they are worth, and you have been avoiding them for long enough that avoidance has started to feel like preference.
This is for you if you are a perfectly socially functional person who simply misses the kind of evening that used to happen more easily, where you were somewhere with people and there was something to do and time passed without anyone noticing.
This is for you if you are a clinician, a coach, a counselor, a teacher, or anyone whose professional life is organized around other people’s well-being and who has been quietly neglecting their own.
This is for you if you are reading this at eleven o’clock on a Thursday night and thinking about what you are doing tomorrow evening and the answer is nothing particular.
The group is open. No screening. No application. No requirement that you have a reason beyond showing up. The only qualification for a seat at the table is the decision to take one.
The Part About Not Being a Game Person
I promised I would address this and I meant it.
The most common reason people give for not coming is some version of “I’m not really a game person.” They say it the way people say they are not a morning person or not a math person, as though it is a fixed category they were assigned at some point and have been working around ever since.
Here is what I have learned from years of watching people who described themselves as not game people walk into a session and not leave until the games are being packed away: the category is not as fixed as it feels.
What most people mean when they say they are not a game person is one of a few specific things. They mean they do not like competition, or they do not like losing, or they had a bad experience with a game that took four hours and ended a friendship, or they feel like they will not understand the rules and will slow everyone down, or they simply do not know what kind of game they like because they have not had much occasion to find out.
These are all reasonable starting points. None of them are permanent conditions.
The games we play are chosen specifically to work for people across a wide range of experience levels and comfort with competition and tolerance for complex rules. Some nights the game takes fifteen minutes to explain and two hours to play. Some nights it takes two minutes and thirty. The range is wide and the selection is intentional, because the game is not the point. The people around the game are the point. And people, in the right structure, with the right amount of time and the right thing to focus on, have a reliable tendency to become more interesting than anyone expected, including themselves.
You do not need to be a game person.
You need to be a person.
That is sufficient.
Come This Friday. Or Saturday. Or Both.
We are open every Friday and Saturday evening from 6 PM to 11 PM.
You can arrive at 6 and stay until 11. You can arrive at 8 and stay until 9. You can come once to see what it is and never come back, though in my experience that is not usually how it goes.
Register on Meetup or just show up. Registration is not required. There is no cost to join. No requirement that you tell anyone you are coming – but check the event page to be sure we are hosting (I very rarely cancel). You can walk in and sit down and within twenty minutes you will be inside a game with people who were strangers thirty minutes ago and who, by the end of the evening, will be something more than that. Not necessarily friends, not yet, but something more than strangers. Something closer to the word neighbor in its oldest sense: a person who shares your space and has, by virtue of that sharing, a small but real claim on your attention.
That is not nothing. In a world that is very good at producing acquaintances and very poor at producing the kind of repeated, incidental, low-stakes contact that turns acquaintances into something more durable, that is actually quite a lot.
The table is set.
The games are ready.
The chair across from someone who showed up tonight and decided this was worth trying is waiting for the person who makes the same decision.
Come find out what happens when you sit down.
Board Game Therapy Open Group
Every Friday and Saturday
6 PM to 11 PM
3630 George Washington Memorial Hwy F1, Yorktown, VA 23693
No experience necessary. Open to all.
Questions? Reach out to Sean@freespiritonline.org.
I’ll see you at the table.
This is a pretty solid article, board game group is great!