Задание №10 — Чтение

If a student is shy and it is hard to make him or her speak English during a lesson, communication games can be a good solution to the problem. There are literally thousands of board and card games developed by hundreds of enthusiastic teachers worldwide. The Internet will also offer you many shops selling games you can use during your lesson. This way your students will concentrate on the game itself without realizing that, in fact, they are being taught something, and they will feel comfortable.

Most people don’t realize board games are actually prehistoric, meaning we had board games before we had written language. Dice was the basis of humanity’s oldest board games. Some years ago, a series of 49 small carved painted stones were found in southeast Turkey. They are thought to be more than 5000 years old and they are the earliest gaming pieces ever found. Similar pieces have recently been found in Syria and Iraq and some other places and seem to point to board games originating there.

Many games require some level of both skill and luck. A player may be hampered by bad luck in backgammon, Monopoly or Risk but over many games a skilled player will win more often, and the elements of luck can make for more excitement, and more diverse and multifaceted strategies, as concepts such as expected value and risk management must be considered. European board games are notable for having less luck element than North American ones but there are exceptions, of course.

While the board gaming market is still estimated to be smaller than that for video games, it has also experienced significant growth from the late 1990s. The rise in board game popularity has been attributed to quality improvement as well as increased availability. A 1991 estimate for the global board game market was over $1.2 billion. A 2001 estimate for the US ‘board games and puzzle’ market gave a value of under $400 million, and for the UK, of about £50 million $–$ that’s quite a lot, actually.

A lot of people enjoy playing board games but they don’t have time to play them at leisure. However, they have time to kill on public transport, when stuck in traffic jams or queuing. There’s good news for board game lovers $–$ there are literally thousands of applications for both iPhone and Android platforms where they can find familiar board games in a convenient format. You can play against artificial intelligence or find a person to play with online. You can now play your favourite games anytime and anywhere.

Luck may be introduced into a game by many different methods. The use of a dice of various sorts goes back to the earliest board games. These can decide everything from how many steps a player moves their token, as in Monopoly, to how their forces fare in battle, as in Risk, or which resources a player gains, as in The Settlers of Catan. Other games use special cards that, when shuffled, create randomness. Other games use spinners, timers of random length and so on. This creates unexpected twists.

An important aspect of some board games is diplomacy $–$ that is, players making deals with one another. Negotiation generally features only in games with three or more players, cooperative games being the exception. An important facet of The Settlers of Catan, for example, is convincing players to trade with you rather than with opponents. In Risk, two or more players may team up against others. Diplomacy may involve making elaborate plans together thus having more chance to win the game.