PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Trouble ensues for Curtis, a bright-eyed tot with a bandana and pirate's hat, when Pushy Pete elbows him at the amusement park and knocks his tokens down the drain.

He's helped by generous friends in one of a series of new games developed by toymaker Hasbro aimed at helping preschool-age children improve their social skills.

The three games focus on a different lesson -- sharing, listening and good manners -- and are each accompanied by a book and CD. They take place at either a pizza parlor, amusement park or picnic and follow a group of kids in the fictional town of Noodleboro as they navigate sticky social situations that teach them proper behavior.

The concept for the games emerged from Hasbro market research indicating that parents of preschoolers tend to prioritize imparting basic social, rather than academic, skills to their young children.

"At the end of the day, while we feel responsible to teach the ABCs and all those things and have our kids get ready for school, when it comes to a lot of the social skills, we like to say that the buck stops here," said Jill Hambley, vice president of marketing at Pawtucket-based Hasbro, the world's second-biggest toy company.

Hasbro plans to release more Noodleboro games next year, Hambley said.

Some other social skill games have emerged on the market too, joining a broader class of educational games -- such as the LeapFrog and VTech products -- that have grown in popularity in recent years.

The Noodleboro games are similar in some ways to traditional children's games, except players are rewarded not for a particular dice roll but rather for listening carefully, sharing tokens with friends and saying "please" and "thank you."

The pizza parlor game, for instance, asks a child to fill a parent or adult's order by listening for the requested toppings and then placing the corresponding cards on a cardboard pie.

The Noodleboro CDs include a sing-along theme song with lyrics like, "We say 'thank you' and we say 'please.' I think of you and you think of me," as well as songs about the virtues of sharing, listening and manners.

While some parents are dubious, Marilyn Skinner, director of the Center for Early Childhood Education at Indiana University-Kokomo, said the games could be useful, provided an adult played them alongside a child to reinforce the social skills lessons.

"One of the things that we find is that through social skills being developed, you're also developing communication and language and the understanding of words," Skinner said.

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