Free board game templates for a good cause?

Okay, let me see, how to phrase this question…

I am a MSW (masters’ of social work) student in my last semester. My internship is at a community mental health center. Basically, most of what I do is to lead groups in the partial hospitalization program,which sort of provides a bridge between hospitalization and living in the communities for people with severe and persistent mental illnesses. I get to design all of the content of the groups. Yeah, I’m kind of amazed that they let an intern do this, too, but that’s how it works in community mental health because of the kind of budgets that exist!

It can be a real challenge to come up with content that both satisfies Medicare guidelines and keeps clients engaged. Therapeutic board games would be wonderful; however, there is absolutely no budget for anything like that. They do exist but my commitment to this internship just cannot extend to spending all that money. But I already spend a LOT of time outside of my internship hours designing class content (which I do not have to do!) so, well, as long as I’m doing that, it dawned on me that I could take an existing board game and adapt it as a therapeutic game. It really wouldn’t be hard. (We already do that with Bingo.) However, I don’t have any board games, nor do I know anyone who does (except Scrabble, and I don’t think that would work too well.) Nor am I going to go out and spend money on regular board games!

So my question is, is there some kind of online source that has… for want of a better term… “board game templates”? Rules, maybe printout boards and game pieces? It just seems that something like this has got to be out there. All advice appreciated! :slight_smile:

Dunno about templates, but a nice letter to board game manufacturers might get you somewhere. It really is a small cost, and most of these companies do give to charity.

A number of years ago I was involved in setting up a mental health drop in group. The local opportunity shops (Salvation Army and St Vincent De Paul) basically gave us heaps of stuff (games in particular) once they knew what we wanted them for. A craft shop donated art and craft materials. We put an ad (which the paper gave us for free because we snuck it in a story) in the local paper and we were inundated by offers of donations.
You never know until you ask.

Are you looking for stuff that already exists as popular, well-known board games? Probably the only way you’re going to get those for free is by requesting donations directly from the makers or by posting an ad requesting personal donations of second-hand games.

Otherwise, there is this site. I can’t vouch for any of the games as I just found it on a quick google for ‘free board games’. They seem to have created these games themselves and have put up PDFs of the boards and rules (though they are not all board games). Even if not quite what you are after, some seem quite adaptable.

Here’s a list of a few hundred games that you can print out and play. They’re also rated so you can get an idea of the quality of them (as a rule anything with a ranking and a score over 6.5 is pretty good).