Roll With It and Chat Chains Review

If you’re looking for engaging ways to get kids recognizing and opening up about their feelings, then check out two new games created by child psychologists. 

Chat Chains is a “game that connects us”. Its goal is to have the longest on-topic conversation. It comes with 75 Topic Cards, 60 Response Cards, 10 Activity Cards, and five Prompt Cards. The Topic and Activity Cards get shuffled together into a single draw pile. You’ll have two piles of Response Cards with the +1 sides face-up. (The +2 sides are for more advanced players who are ready to ask open-ended questions and give more detailed answers or comments.) Then, the Prompt Cards get placed facedown in a pile. Whoever is the Chat Starter draws a Topic Card and places it in the center of the play area. If it’s an Activity Card, do that activity, discard the card, and draw another Topic Card. There are two topic questions on each card, and the Chat Starter picks one to ask the player to their left. Once that player answers the question, they place a green Answer/Comment Response Card next to the Topic Card to start the Chat Chain. Now each player takes a turn to add to the conversation, adding a green Response card if they answer the question or adding a blue Response card if they asked a follow-up question. A player could even answer a question and ask a new one on the same turn. If a player gets stuck, they can draw a Prompt Card to help them continue the conversation and place that card in the Chat Chain. The Chat Chain breaks and the round ends when a player decides to end the conversation or a player goes off-topic or a player takes too long to respond. You can calculate a team score for the round by adding up the Topic Card points with the Response Card points of all players. You can also score individually by adding up the points on each player’s Response Cards. Now it’s the next player’s turn to be the Chat Starter. The whole game can end after a set number of rounds, a predetermined time limit, or a target team score is reached. This game can be played with two to eight players ages 8 and up.

Through the gameplay of Roll With It, kids ages 5 and up can learn more than 50 coping skills. It helps with four primary emotions: anger, anxiety, boredom, and sadness. The game comes with a How Do You Feel card, a Boredom Busters card, four Coping Skills dice, an Anxiety Soother Mindful Mat, a Star Stress Ball, and a Write & Draw Board. Parents ask their child to pick an emotion from the How Do You Feel card. Take note of the emotion’s background color because that is the color die that the child will roll. Each die has six coping skills images to help kids with the emotion they’re feeling. Look at the image rolled and do the coping skill associated with that image. For example, if a child is angry, they might roll the image to talk about it. Or if the child is sad, they might be prompted to journal or draw how they feel on the Write & Draw Board. There are some helpful tips for parents in the instructions.