The “Los colores de la memoria” board game is an initiative that was created spontaneously by members of the psychosocial team at Residència La Llar, who noticed that there isn’t much in the way of cognitive stimulation materials for older people and it can be boring to have so few options.

So they came up with the idea to create a board game to help older people use and keep their skills active, based on solving riddles and exercises in a multi-player game.

What they really wanted was a game that could be used at other centres for the elderly (day centres, hospitals, residences, etc.) as well as by families with elderly members living at home, to have fun together.

Nobody had ever done anything like it. The psychosocial team had to make up the questions, exercises, create the rules of game, establish the cognitive goals… And someone had to design it and make it. That’s how we got involved.

This game is the result of years of hard work, and many phases of testing and analysis. The psychosocial team behind the project validated it at each step of the project right through to the finished game.

This means loads of revisions, corrections, changes. In the design, everything was adapted to ensure this tool would suit its purpose: to be a game designed specifically for the elderly. Finally, the game is a reality and people seem to be enjoying playing it, as well as arousing quite a bit of interest in the professional sector. Here at Xoo Studio, we couldn’t be happier.

The goal of the game is to have fun. So it had to look fun.

The elderly respond well to bright colours, so colour had to be at the centre. We used the colours in geometric shapes, a mandala, which is commonly used in caring for the elderly to work on attention and creativity.

This mandala has 6 pieces, which represent the 6 areas of

knowledge in the game (culture, calculations, language, etc.).

Graphically, we put a new twist on the classical mandala style (normally much more Baroque), creating a modern mandala with clean lines, backgrounds enriched with geometric patterns (triangles, dots, stars, rhombuses, etc.) and a very up-to-date graphic resource, very much in the line of flat design.

The game was designed with the needs of the elderly in mind at every step. Xoo Studio adapted to the instructions of the psychosocial team at La Llar in coming up with the design, as they are the experts in the cognitive needs of the elderly.

The game cards, instructions, rules, images used, font size… absolutely everything is designed to be useful, attractive and easily understood by the elderly. And, logically, all of the questions were written with them in mind.

As one resident at La Llar Fundació said, this game “opens your mind. It makes you think and is loads of fun.” Right! What more can we say?