“Ritual play” such as billiards, shuffleboard, foosball, and other games have a direct benefit on your physical and mental health from getting you standing and your muscles moving to developing your mental acuity and releasing stress.
Play allows us to learn how to be creative and helps to nurture our critical thinking, personality development, and physical capabilities, from a very young age. However, play isn’t reserved for childhood. The benefits of play are far-reaching, but we often give up play as adults for more serious pursuits such as careers, relationships, and families—all of which are valid pursuits. Yet, we can and should
make time for play as adults with our family, friends, and neighbors. Billiards, shuffleboard, foosball, chess, and activities or sports with pre-set rules and structures all fall into the world of “ritual play.” In ritual play, we can create, strategize, design, and engage in activities that bring people together for a shared purpose or common good.
Physical benefits of play.
Whether it’s by diving to handle a backhand shot in ping pong or ripping a shot on goal from the mid-fielders of a foosball game, ritual play has physical benefits for us. Playing billiards, ping pong, or foosball will force you to stretch your body and gain balance. In order to get the right angle for your next play, you might have to sprawl out across the table or remove a leg from the ground to give you the balance you need.
Other benefits include:
Improves Coordination.
The low-impact but physical nature of ritual play can improve leg, arm, and core strength improving coordination.
Relieves Stress.
Concentration, when combined with an increased heart rate, releases endorphins helping to stave off stress and anxiety.
Burns Calories.
The bursts of exertion and recovery in playing pool, ping pong, foosball, and shuffleboard burn plenty of calories.
Improves Breathing.
Coordinating your movements with your breath helps to train your mind and body to perform in a consistent manner.
Cognitive benefits of play.
Games such as billiards, ping pong, foosball, shuffleboard, and others require concentration and creativity. Not only is the body engaged in increasing blood flow to deliver oxygen and nutrients to active muscles, including the brain. This increased blood flow helps to reduce brain fog and increase mental acuity, focus, and memory. The healthier your body is, the better state your mind will be in, so, the more you play, the better condition you will be in on the whole.
Other benefits include:
Improves Concentration.
Playing games like pool and ping pong develops mental acuity, alertness, concentration, and tactical strategy.
Develops Social Skills.
Engaging with others as a part of a diverse social community improves your mental health and wellbeing.
Increases Confidence.
Hitting the perfect break or using backspin requires a lot of practice and when accomplished builds self-esteem.
Encourages Strategic Thinking.
Anticipating your opponent's moves engages the prefrontal cortex—a part of the brain used for strategic thinking.
Beyond physical and cognitive benefits.
STEAM is an abbreviation for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Math. STEAM represents an integrated approach to learning that encourages students to think more broadly about real-world problems. STEAM education produces a whole host of benefits, such as developing soft skills (creativity, problem-solving, collaboration, etc.) to increasing engagement and motivation. “Ritual play” is a great example of STEAM in action.
Each of these games involve conscious or subconscious calculation of distances, power, speed, and angles to ascertain exact points and directions. In a sense, these actions are bringing the lessons of fundamental geometry, classical mechanics, and material science into direct experiences. Players won’t just get the recreational benefit of positive physical and social interaction; they will also benefit from learning about motion and friction, vectors and trajectories, angles, and estimates.
Gameplay for every space.
Indoor game rooms.
A game room in a house is a space used exclusively for leisure activities. Whether your favorite recreational activities at home include movies, music, video games, board games, or larger games like billiards, ping pong, or darts, you’ll want an engaging game room to show off all your toys and to keep your guests coming back for more.
This is also the case for many commercial properties—whether you’re furnishing a hip game room in a boutique hotel or an area within a company’s headquarters to enable employees to socialize and build relationships.
Either way, at Billiards by Brandt we not only build best-in-class game tables—from pool tables to shuffleboard tables—we work with clients to design the overall feel of the room to ensure it meets their needs and desires.
Outdoor play areas.
Being outdoors can improve your health and well-being. As a result, many families are finding ways to incorporate outdoor play areas in their backyards—from outdoor projectors to create a place to watch the movies under the stars, to pairing a foosball table with oversized cornhole boards to challenge friends. These spaces are becoming more elaborate and flexible to enable more meaningful moments.
The growing creative use of outdoor spaces is also true at commercial properties where experiential offerings are in more demand by consumers. Apartment buildings are adding outdoor play areas as a way to distinguish them when it comes to the amenities they offer.
At Billiards by Brandt, our work is built to stand up to the elements and rigorous gameplay.
Custom designs
Every build starts with the imagination of our clients. We then work closely with you to customize every element of the design, down to the minute details.
Premium materials
Our products are created with the highest quality natural materials and sourced from sustainable resources by the finest providers from around the world.
Crafted by hand
We don’t pull pre-made pieces off a shelf and assemble them; rather, every piece is crafted to the exact specifications we’ve outlined with you in the custom design.
White glove service
Our game tables reside in homes, companies, resorts, and more across the United States and abroad; contact us for details about international shipping.
Our guarantee to you.
We guarantee 100% customer satisfaction for life. We meticulously handcraft our pieces so you and your loved ones will enjoy the quality and attention to detail that they provide. We guarantee you will be proud to say your game room is from Billiards by Brandt.
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