Winning at Loss

game Description

Winning at Loss® is a therapeutic and educational board game designed to help guide children through their grief. The game contains mostly open-ended questions that encourage children to open up and share their feelings and beliefs. In the game players navigate up and down five mountains that represent the stages of grief. Alternately, if your program does not utilize stages, the card decks and mountains become simply categories of questions.

The stages or categories are:

• Dealing with the shock
• Admitting the reality of the loss
• Feeling the pain of loss
•  Adjusting to life after loss
• Rebuilding for the future

In addition to the four groups of questions mentioned above, there is a fifth deck with true-false questions that give important information on the grieving process and “Play” cards that have the players do silly things to break up the seriousness of the subject matter.
A great strength is the game’s ability to get kids who tend to “pass” to open up and share their feelings. The game also helps players move beyond the present and become familiar with the changes and adjustments needed for rebuilding their lives.
There are separate decks of “easier” cards for grades K - 3. There are also two sets of rules: one focuses on the stages and one refers to the decks of cards as categories of questions, but not as stages of grief. The game comes with a facilitator’s booklet with lesson plans and questions for a post-game discussion.