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��is an organization located in ��ݮ��Ƶ, Ontario that is dedicated to empowering children, families, youth, and mothers by providing a safe, supportive space for skill-building and connection. Their mission is to prevent poverty and negative life trajectories by fostering self-discovery and community engagement. Through a prevention-orientation approach, A4C offers opportunities to help individual develop resilience, confidence, and a sense of belonging. Their programs focus on 6 key pillars: creating experiences, providing opportunities, enabling contribution, fostering peer culture, creating safe spaces, and projecting mentorship. By supporting vulnerable community members, A4C they aim to help participants build meaningful relationship and develop new skills (e.g., they run a very popular program to learn basic and advanced sewing skills). The staff of A4C were largely fluent in English as their first or later-acquired language. Children, families and youth participating in A4C have varied levels of fluency in English and many are newcomers to Canada.��

The primary goal for the board game collection was for its use during a weekly After-School Kids’ Club program for children 6 to 10 years of age that they run off-site in a local school. This program runs for a total of 2 hours with various activities planned during this time. It is a staffed program and thus adults, high school students, and undergraduate student volunteers are on hand to help children learn and play the games, allowing for the addition of some more complex games to play (e.g., Mantis). The goal for the board game collection was to be an additional activity that would be put into the regular schedule and run for about half an hour to 45 minutes. This also meant games could have longer playing times up to 20 minutes (e.g., Go Nuts for Donuts). The numbers of children attending varied, but was approximately around 20, and the children either knew each other from school or from seeing each other over time as this was a program families registered for in advance as part of after-school care (it was not a drop-in program). Some children were fluent English speakers and others were English Language Learners. When school is not in session, this board game collection could be moved to their main site for more informal use by parents and children visiting.

A secondary goal for the collection was to accommodate more informal on-site board game play during Youth Drop-in sessions aimed at 14 to 17+ years.

Our development of the collection began with a meeting with two staff members. We brought a large collection of games to show them and get their first impressions as to what might work well. We then put together a preliminary collection for Kids’ Club and visited the program twice to help the children and staff learn the games and try them out to refine the collection depending on what worked well and which games were liked and received well by the children. We also left the collections behind for a few weeks so that the games could continue to be used and we could receive further feedback from both staff members.

To develop a smaller add-on collection to be used more informally on-site by older 14-17+ youth during drop-in sessions on-site., we also attended one of these session. This session ran for approximately 1.5 hours and included 40 youth who played a selection of games, including options tailored to their age group as well as some from the Kids’ Club collection. Based on this, and feedback received, we identified additional games that could be incorporated specifically for older youth. We did also find that many of the games selected for Kids’ Club were well-suited for a broader range of ages, reinforcing the versatility of the collection.

In the Table below, you will see a listing of all the board games in the collection for A4C and accompanying materials we developed that are openly available. We have separated this table into three parts to show you the games specifically for Kids’ Club (6 to 10 years), games that could be used by both Kids’ Club and Youth (6-14+ yrs), and a few Youth specific games (14 – 17+ years).

The materials here are provided openly for other interested schools and community locations to use and adapt according to a license, unless stated otherwise. This license allows re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format fornoncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. (The creator for the text of these materials should be indicated to be Daniela O'Neill. Some items may have other stated attributions, such as photographs or drawings for which sources and any applicable permissions are noted).��

Some of the most important considerations, that led to either a game being included or not included in the Kids’ Club collection, were:

• suitable for age range of 6 to 10 years of age
• playing time of 20 minutes or less
• allow for 4 to 5 children to play at once, with some allowing more
• little or no reading required to play
• play mechanics could be a bit more complicated or newer (e.g., Mantis) because staff were on hand to play with the children
• have an element of chance so that older children or staff don’t always win
• mixture of competitive and cooperative games
• wide variety of themes to promote breadth of vocabulary learning along with literacy and story-telling skills and that would be appealing and fun for children of different ages, genders, and cultures
• as in all our collections, we avoided any games with commercial or popular culture themes that might limit conversation if not familiar to all children, games with noisy elements, and games with parts that could get used up (e.g., dry erase markers)
• as in all our collections, we prioritized high-quality, durable games with beautiful aesthetics and art to provide more for players to see and talk about
• this particular school hosting the Kids’ Club also had a Board Game Buddies collection and so we also tried to find some games that would be new, or different versions, for the children if they were also familiar with those in the Board Game Buddies collection

In addition, for a smaller set of Youth (14 to 17+ yrs) games aimed for informal drop-in use, some of the most important criteria were:

• playing time of 30 minutes or less
• suitable for a variety of English fluency levels
• accommodate groups of 3-5 youth
• fairly easy to learn and play, allowing for more conversation (game related or not) as the game is played, to fit with the more informal nature of the drop-in youth group and its emphasis on youth having fun and getting to know each other