Game on! Time for some fun during those long winter nights this Christmas…
The following blog is a bit of fun. Rest assured, Notify take health and safety seriously – it’s why we are on a global mission to make a billion people safer at work. In the age of COVID-19, we have all become aware of the importance of workforce health and safety. Have you recognised gaps in your company’s approach over the last year? If you have, you aren’t alone – and there’s something you can do about it.
As the days become colder and the nights stretch on for longer, our thoughts turn to a warm, snug fire, a glass of wine, and perhaps a not-so-friendly family board game night! We all have our firm favourites, and we all know things can get a little competitive when you go head-to-head against our nearest and dearest.
Just like the world of big business, your aim as a player is to beat the competition. Using sly tactics and cunning strategies, you make your way around the board, using any means necessary to be crowned the champion.
Unlike business, however, the rules of board games are not exactly in line with most health and safety guidelines. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to play Cluedo in real life, or to travel around a life size Monopoly board with a huge wad of cash in your pocket, buying properties at the drop of a hat?
Spoiler alert: you wouldn’t get past even the most basic health and safety audit. Ever.
Here, we explore five board games that would fail their safety audits instantly (and spectacularly!). We’d love to hear what corrective actions you might suggest to help them make the grade.
Prepare for some hair-raising health and safety faux-pas that might make you think differently at your next family game night. Let’s get started…
Cluedo
Cluedo is a classic family board game, full of intrigue, mystery and deception. Six eccentric strangers, all with their own thinly veiled motives, piled together in one stately home for a weekend away. Just your typical company teambuilding offsite, right?
Wrong. There’s one more twist: someone’s going to die. Hopefully, that’s not your average company offsite.
Daggers and ropes left lying around willy-nilly? No CCTV in the communal areas? No overnight security? The hospitality staff surely haven’t been briefed on their health and safety duties! Now there’s been a murder, and who’s going to take the fall for all the health and safety rules that have been broken? There’s not much compliance going on around here…
There’s no doubt about it: Cluedo would fail its health and safety audit within minutes.
Monopoly
Imagine wandering around London town, buying railway stations on a whim and building hotels on Mayfair without any planning permission.
You stumble upon Liverpool Street Station, hand over the cash, and wander off down Fleet Street for a bit of shopping without a second look. That’s what you get when you play Monopoly: a game that accurately predicts London’s inflated house prices but falls short at passing a routine health and safety inspection.
Who’s maintaining the tracks of your newly purchased railway station? Who’s performing the risk assessment for your brand-new hotel on the most expensive street in the UK?
Not even a Get Out Of Jail Free card will get Monopoly’s health and safety failures off the hook!
Carcassonne
The aim of the game Carcassonne is this: develop an expansive landscape, place your figurines there, and claim as much territory as possible before your opponent gets there first. Think Risk, but set in the French countryside. Risk, but with rolling fields and lots of smelly cheese.
While this might sound like a board game lover’s dream, Carcassonne encompasses every health and safety inspector’s nightmare: an untrained town and country planner building roads and developing cities without really knowing what they’re doing.
If you are in the construction industry, you might be thinking this: who is laying the tarmac for these roads? Are they wearing the right PPE, and have their vehicles been maintained to the required standard? The workers are surely grafting overtime to get this done – are they being compensated accordingly and given regular rest breaks?
Who’s worrying about the impact of fatigue?
One thing is for sure – there’s no way Carcassonne is passing its health and safety inspection.
Ticket To Ride (Europe Edition)
Ticket To Ride’s original US edition is wildly popular – and not just among locomotive enthusiasts. The updated Ticket To Ride Europe is a little closer to home, featuring routes between most major European cities, from London to Moscow.
In Ticket To Ride, the aim is simple: place your plastic rolling stock on the route you are given on the cards at the start of the game. There’s no time for safety measures here: just get your train on the track and claim the route before another player does.
Where do we even begin with all these health and safety failures?! Are all these tracks being well controlled and maintained, who’s checking up on signaling and who is regulating the travel times to ensure compatibility with the other player’s train routes? The train cars aren’t even connected to each other – it’s enough to make any safety professional sweat!
We would never advise that a rail travel enthusiast buy a ticket to ride on one of these detached, unregulated trains. Ride at your own risk!
The Football Game
The Football Game is a deep-dive into the complicated world of this global sport. Each player takes control of a football club at the start of the game and manages it for a full season.
They don’t just play football, they oversee everything – from the fans, to player injuries, to stadium maintenance, and everything in between. Future football managers beware: this game will not prepare you for the hoops you need to jump through in the real world. Health and safety is basically nonexistent here: it’s every manager for himself.
Why would The Football Game fail so miserably? Firstly, injured players are expensive, so you’ll need to prove your compliance with good practice. Were your training grounds maintained to the proper health and safety standards? Were the appropriate staff trained in first aid? Were the correct (digital) forms filled out in the event of a fan or player injury?
There’s a lot of work to do before any clubs taking part in The Football Game can pass a health and safety inspection. You’d better contact Notify if you want any hope of getting through to the next round.
What can Notify do for my business?
On a more serious note, we can help with all your Health & Safety requirements.
Notify has developed mobile-first software that can revolutionise how your company manages health, safety and sustainability.
From foundational aspects such as setting up digital risk assessments and audits to reactive elements around incident reporting and action tracking, Notify has you covered. We offer a comprehensive package that will digitise your health and safety, making it easy, efficient and cost-effective to manage.
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