Gameplay: Level-Up Board Game Club Weeks 8 & 9 Wrap-Up

These past two weeks may have put a wrap on board game club for the school year. Although I opened up the club again for trimester three, as of writing, I don’t have enough kiddos signed up for it to run. The move from Fridays to Mondays put it in a more competitive scheduling spot, and a few families with kids on the current roster relayed to me that unfortunately Mondays just won’t work. I have one more week to get a few more sign-ups, and so plugged the club one more time in my class’s weekly newsletter to parents, and opened it up to first grade students as well. We will see if my last-ditch efforts can put us over the threshold. But either way, I’m content with how the inaugural season shook out.

For the last two weeks of the club, I refreshed the game offerings I borrowed from Games of Berkeley, returning some of the usuals like Planet and Dragonwood. In their place, I checked out a handful of abstract strategy games including Blokus, Hive, and Qwirkle as well as a copy of Catan. The abstract games are each easy enough to teach with few, simple rules determining what you can and cannot do on your turn. I figured they would be good to teach quickly and leave some students to their own devices.

That thinking ended up being true for Blokus. In the penultimate meeting of the trimester, one of the kids instantly recognized the oversized colorful box. Blokus was his jam, and one of the few games he had and played regularly at home. He and a small group ended up on the carpet for a better portion of the meetup. I’m not entirely sure they were playing by any consistent set of rules, or just tetrising pieces together, but either way they were occupied and had a great time.

A game of Qwirkle really benefits from a genuinely flat surface. Here we played on four connected desks and had to get crafty to avoid tiles falling into the crevices.

A few middle school students crashed the club again—much to my delight—and decided to try their hand at Catan. One had played before and taught her friends. I’m glad one of them was able to take the lead there. I reckon that if they had asked me to show them, it definitely would have felt more like the dorky teacher trying to explain a more complex game than they were expecting, compared to the novel, kind of hilarious game that actually unfolded among them. The one who was doing the teaching would dole out one rule at a time, and only mentioned things as they came up in the game. Like when she went to buy a development card for the first time, she finally explained what development cards were. Her friends thought this was totally unfair (which it probably was, given none of them had ever played before) and decided to team up on her.

5-Minute Dungeon continued to be a huge hit in the final two weeks. While a few of the students decided to return to their game designs, making cards, drawing game boards onto cardboard boxes, there was always a game of 5-Minute Dungeon going on among the others. Kiddos were hopping in and out between rounds, trying on different roles, and even convinced me to get in on a few games when they were stuck on Zola the Gorgon. Few games that we played this trimester in the club were genuinely cooperative, or at least awakened the kind of cooperative spirit that 5-Minute Dungeon did. With only five minutes on the ever-ticking clock, the kids didn’t have time to bicker, didn’t have time to have inexplicable hurt feelings and say something unkind towards one another like some other games incited. It was crunch time and there were obstacles, monsters, and bosses to defeat. I marveled at the genuinely cooperative attitude the timed aspect of this game demanded of those playing it. I have to say, out of all the games I ingested into the library I’m starting at the school, this one has to be the winner. The replayability is strong, and it abets one of the core ideas around which I started this club; that is, teaching kids the vocabulary and patience for working together towards a common goal through gaming.

I do hope a few more interested kids sign up to keep the party going for next trimester. But if we have had the last session of the year, I already have plenty of food for thought and a lot of ideas swirling around in my head for next year.