I’m a huge boardgame fan. And no, I don’t mean Monopoly. Modern boardgaming is enjoying a renaissance these days, there are so many different kinds of games with different mechanics. My colleague Shaun Wilden and I gave a talk about boardgame mechanics at IATEFL this year, and had numerous discussions about how we could adapt some newer boardgames to the classroom. I feel that recently the area of ‘games’ in the classroom is quite digital - Kahoot being the prime example. These are six proudly analogue games that you can use/adapt/make your own version for your classes. I’ve adapted the summary for each game from the game publisher’s page on Boardgamegeek and I include a link to a short gameplay/instructions video for each one so you can see how it works.
1 Timeline
This is a card game where each card depicts a historical event, invention or discovery on both sides, with the year in which that event occurred, invention or discovery was made on only one side. Players take turns placing a card from their hand in a row on the table. After placing the card, the player reveals the date on it. If the card was placed correctly with the date in chronological order with all other cards on the table, the card stays in place; otherwise the card is removed from play and the player takes another card from the deck. The first player to get rid of all their cards by placing them correctly wins.
You could make your own version of this for past tense sentences or passive voice.
Gameplay link.
2 Colorful
This is a small game. Everyone in the group has a list of the same five colours. Each round a player comes up with a specific word within a broad topic (for example, if the topic is transport you might select TAXI). The members of the group must secretly match the word with one of five colours they have. You continue for four more rounds, until everyone has used all their colours. You get points for each round in which your selected colour matches what the majority of others chose. So if everyone chose BLACK for the word taxi, and I chose YELLOW then I don’t get a point. This could be good for vocabulary review.
Gameplay link.
3 Just One
This is a cooperative party game. As a group, you need to help your teammate guess a mystery word. You each secretly write down ONE word to help your teammate guess the word. Before you show your words to your teammate, you show them to each other (without your teammate seeing). If any of you wrote the same word, you cannot show those words to the teammate to help them guess. This is a game which is played over rounds, and little by little you will be trying to think of the best clue, a word which no other person will be choosing. It really helps extend your vocabulary.
This is another great vocabulary guessing game and very easy to make your own with bits of paper.
Gameplay link.
4 Five Second Rule
Five Second Rule is a board and card game (although to be honest you don’t need the board). It’s a brainstorming game in which you draw cards with categories on them. You call out what is written on the card and one player has 5 seconds to say three words in that category. This has always been a big family hit. It comes with a twisty timer thing that makes a funny noise. If I used this in class and didn’t have the game I’d use an online classroom timer like one of these.
The fun part is the variety of categories, here are some: Name three kinds of dog, Name three pink things, Name three things you put on your feet. There’s a free online version of the game you can project onto your board (yeah I know I said analogue before…) and you could also get an idea of the categories by just browsing through it.
This game makes for a great warmer or revision tool. Just make your own set of categories.
Gameplay link.
5 Splurt
Splurt is yet another card-based word game. In Splurt, you turn over two cards and players race to shout out answers that match the clues on flipped-up cards. One set of cards has categories of things e.g. sports, names of world leaders, forms of transport. The other set of cards has various conditions e.g. contains an O, has three syllables, begins with L. The first player to correctly shout an answer that matches the category AND fulfills the condition collects the card. The game ends when all cards are revealed, and the player with the most cards wins. You can make your own cards too. There is even a free print-and-play version here.
Gameplay link.
6 Fake Artist goes to New York
This is originally a game from Japan, and it’s a party game for 5-10 players. One player (the Question Master) sets a category, chooses a word within that category on cards, and hand those out to other players as artists. At the same time, one player will have only an "X" written on their card: they are the fake artist.
The artists will then go around the table twice, drawing one contiguous stroke each on a paper to draw the word established by the Question Master, then guess who the fake artist is. If the fake artist is not caught, both the fake artist and the Question Master earn points; if the fake artist is caught and cannot guess what the word is, the artists earn points.
This game uses a traitor mechanic, one of the most popular mechanics in recent boardgaming history (also being made popular by TV reality shows such as The Traitors). It’s also super easy to adapt this to a classroom activity.
Gameplay link.
As an aside, I’ll be giving a very similar talk to the one we did at IATEFL on this topic at the ELT Innovate conference next week in Barcelona.