Games for Seniors With Dementia: One Step at a Time

What changes when there is a diagnosis

Before a diagnosis, a game is usually chosen for what it trains. After one, the reason shifts: the game is a way to spend twenty minutes together where the person is doing something rather than being looked after. That is a different brief, and it changes which games are worth setting out.

The most common mistake is to keep the old brief. A family buys a memory game because memory is the worry, sits down, and discovers that the game produces exactly the failure everyone was trying to avoid. A game that ends in a wrong answer is not neutral in a house where the wrong answers are the thing being counted.

So the useful question at the table is not what does this exercise, but what does this person still enjoy doing with their hands and their attention. What the care team has said about the person comes first, always; this page is about the twenty minutes, not about the condition.

Choosing by what still works, not by what is lost

Start from what the person can still do without effort, and build the game around that. Familiar objects, a cloth to fold, a drawer of buttons, a song from twenty years ago and a photograph of a face they know are all easier doors than a rule, a score or a question about this morning.

The table sets out the common strengths and the games that lean on them. Read it with one person in mind, because two people with the same diagnosis can be at very different places on a Tuesday afternoon.

How to play without turning it into a test

The manner matters more than the game. A person who feels examined will stop, politely or otherwise, and the twenty minutes is then gone for the day.

• Do it first, slowly, without commentary. A demonstration is worth more than three sentences of instruction.
• Give one step at a time, and say the step as the person is doing it rather than before.
• Never ask do you remember. Ask what they make of the photograph, or hand them the next button, which has no wrong answer.
• Follow their lead when they change the game. If the sorting becomes a pattern, the pattern is now the game, and it is a better one.
• Do not correct. Turn the piece the right way round yourself and carry on as though nothing happened.
• Stop at ten or fifteen minutes, while it is still going well, and say when you are coming back. A short good session is worth three long ones that end badly.

When it goes wrong, and when to stop trying

Restlessness, repeated questions and refusal are usually information about the moment rather than about the game. The usual culprits are the time of day, a full room, noise from a television, hunger, or a task that has quietly become too hard. Change one of those and the same game often works in the afternoon when it failed in the morning.

Some days nothing will land, and the honest response is to put the pieces away and sit down with a cup of tea instead. Sitting together with the radio on is not a failed activity; it is the same twenty minutes without a task attached, and it is not a lesser version of the afternoon.

Anything that looks like a change in the person rather than in the game, such as a new refusal to leave a chair, a sudden fear of a familiar room, or a change in how they walk, belongs with the care team or the doctor rather than with the activity plan. A game is not an assessment, and it cannot tell anybody what is happening.

The family table, the group and the app

A family game at a kitchen table and a group activity in a care home are different things with different rules. In a group, the activity worker is managing eight people and a timetable, and a game has to keep the room together. At home, the whole point is that it is one person and one hour, and it can be abandoned without anybody noticing.

A tablet sits between the two. It can offer a task with a clear shape and adjust the difficulty by itself, which some people find reassuring and others find pointless. If the person still enjoys a screen and can follow a large target with a finger, the six training games in Sanospark run on a tablet the family may already own, with a weekly report for the family; they are set out on the home page. If a screen is now confusing, paper and objects are better, and cognitive training worksheets covers the printed version.

Two honest limits belong here. No game treats dementia, and no app slows it; what a game reliably provides is company, a shared task and a reason to use the hands and the attention, which is worth having on its own account. And a family cannot do the whole job alone: the Alzheimer Association guidance on daily activities is written for carers and is worth reading before building an afternoon around a game, and the WHO fact sheet on ageing and health sets out the wider picture. For the group setting, cognitive stimulation activities is the programme version; for the family role around it, the family in cognitive care is the honest account; and for the one activity that reaches almost everybody, music and memory explains why a song arrives before a name. Where the documents and plans a family would need in a crisis are still not assembled, Legaris is built around them, and where several relatives share the week, Easikin is an SI (Superintelligence) · AI (artificial intelligence) caregiving app for adult children.

Questions families ask about games and dementia

Five questions come up again and again, and the answers are short.

• Should I correct them when they get the name wrong? No. Supply the word once, lightly, and move on. Being corrected repeatedly is tiring and it ends the game.
• Is it bad if they play the same game every day? No, it is usually good. Repetition is what makes a game feel safe, and novelty is the thing that costs energy.
• What if they say the game is for children? Believe them and change the game, not the tone. Objects and household jobs usually work where a printed sheet does not.
• Can a person with dementia still use a tablet? Some can, especially if the target is large and the task is one tap. If the screen has started to confuse them, put it away without discussion.
• Should the game be part of a routine? A fixed time helps more than a fixed activity. The same hour, the same chair and the same person are the routine; the game can change.