Tile Games: Level-Up Board Game Club Week 2 Recap

I chose to host Level-Up Board Game Club after school on Fridays because they are typically light days for me. Not only do we dismiss students an hour early, but my class has several specialist classes that day that take them out of my hands and afford me ample planning periods. The short class time and the looming spectre of the weekend normally make Fridays fly by. But for the second time in as many Fridays, I’ve heeded the call to fill in for an ill colleague, this time covering fourth grade. I don’t mind fourth grade; they’re funnier, in a way, than my second graders, but by the time board game club kicked off, I was more burnt out again than I otherwise was expecting to be.

Week two brought the same exact crew as last time, so it’s looking like we have our corp of gamers: six second graders and two third graders. I’m fond of every student that walks into my classroom, but I’m especially excited by the students in my club. It’s not easy joining a brand new club not knowing what to expect, especially so, I imagine, when that club is run by your teacher that you see for hours on end everyday in school anyway. I’m gratified by their interest in board games, and glad that they don’t seem turned away by spending an extra hour and a half with me at the end of a long and arduous week. Teachers aren’t the only ones beat by a long week.

And they are a varied bunch. Some of the students in board game club perform at the top of their respective classes, and others do not. They share differing areas of academic and social-emotional strengths, and have unsimilar capacities for executive functioning. Most have different primary friend groups, although they are all quite chummy in club. This differentiation continues to inform how I plan our weekly sessions together, from choosing games so that everyone will have something they can learn, play, and enjoy to deciding which table groups I need to check-in with and teach the game to first and which ones can operate a little more independently. And even just two weeks in, I’m beginning to see which students gravitate towards which types of games, furthering helping me pick selections for future weeks.

Students enjoying Kingdomino at board game club 12/12/2025.

The theme for the week was tile games. There are a few reasons I picked this one for the second week. I typically enjoy tile games, and I feel very comfortable teaching and explaining them in ways that seem to resonate with people. I also have a lot of them, including ones that tend lighter and would be appropriate for the audience of the club. In particular, I brought Kingdomino and Beacon Patrol as games that have a very low bar for entry. These two games are easy to teach with few rules that determine their spatial puzzle. Both can also be played enjoyably without much attention to the scoring objective. That is to say, you can draft tiles in Kingdomino in a way that you make a nice-looking squared kingdom but don’t optimize the multiplicative nature of the territories and crowns. Similarly, in Beacon Patrol players can expand the board and keep their boats moving by playing tiles without caring too much about successfully exploring the highest scoring lighthouse tiles. In both cases, I felt like this was a benefit to students who may be able to comprehend the process of drafting or selecting the best tile each turn, but may struggle to connect that to the larger scoring schema.

A few of my younger students were immediately drawn to Kingdomino. The familiarity of the logic of treating them like domino tiles, as well as the limited number of tiles to choose from each turn, allowed them to focus on how to best fit each tile into their area rather than getting hung up on end-game scoring. Students learn in myriad ways, and a few that joined for Kingdomino benefit from visual scaffolds like diagrams and charts in class. In Kingdomino they found a game where their preferred visual learning style was the focal point of the game. For the first play, I told them we would only be counting the biggest area of each terrain/color type, rather than multiplying that largest area by the number of crowns contained within. These are second graders, and multiplication isn’t taught until third grade. That helped them become more familiar with sometimes the trickier part of the game, which is fitting everything neatly and accordingly into the tight 5-by-5 grid. By the end of the session however, the kiddos were independently managing the full game, even if I had to step in to help with the end of game mathematics.

Resetting a hole in Roll in One after some elbow bumping knocked the course apart.

I also went with tile games for this week because Planet was such a hit at the first meeting. It was the one game that had more kiddos interested than there were seats for the game. The 3D nature of the planet component—and thus the tile puzzle—was immediately alluring to students. Although some had dexterity trouble keeping the tiles in the right place as they handled the planet (a common issue from what I can tell about the game), the students loved scouring their planets, especially later in the game when they were almost full, to see the composition of their landforms and thus who would win each animal card. Since there were some students who didn’t get a chance at it last week, I wanted an excuse to include it in the week two lineup. The aforementioned 3D “board” and trifurcated triangular tiles make Planet unique among common tile games.

Randy O’Connor’s Roll in One also made an appearance, although intermittently with different groups who played a single run here and there rather than a concerted course of six or so different holes. A trimmed down version of the game without player abilities or caddy cards helped students focus on the complexity of moving their pieces across space that is divided into different hexes that affect their progress in different ways. They employed different strategies to get to the hole that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a game I’ve played with adults. They intentionally went out of their way to bump one anothers’ balls into more favorable positions. They took strokes in order to have more direct routes to the hole when the path was harassed by water hazards and bunkers. It’s hard to say whether these intricate strategies worked to each’s favor, but I was proud of how they thought critically about the rules, analyzing the spatial puzzle for loopholes, flaws, or workarounds in order to game the game. Like in real golf, however, sometimes the fastest way to the hole is just to hit your strokes.

One student's Pokemon and animal themed game that seems to work like some kind of tableau-builder.

Another student's creation with a lot of check boxes and rollercoaster-like movement path

Starting this week, I decided to let students choose their own time to work on their game design projects, rather than build it into the beginning or the end. After introducing each game at the start of the session, I told students that if they play a game that inspires them to work on their own project in some way, they are welcome to finish the game they’re in, and then get to work on their own craft. I encouraged them to think about the games they were playing this week and how tiles were used in each one, and consider ways that tiles like dominos and polyominoes could be used in their own designs. In particular, one pair of students is eager to make a world domination style game a la Risk featuring robots, monsters, and some likenesses of Italian brainrot characters. After a game of Roll in One, I asked them how they may design their own game board with modular hexes or squares so players can fight battles or move robots across different landscapes.

The club takes a break for a while the next few weeks with the school on hiatus for Winter break. Next time we meet the topic for the week will be card games. Broad, I know. But broad can be good and allow students to see the many ways that games can be propelled forward using cards as primary components. Dixit is absolutely on the list to bring, as I purchased a copy specifically for the game library I’m assembling at the school. That first week back I’m also encouraging students to bring their own games from home as well. I prefaced the request by telling them to prepare and practice the game in advance, so they can teach it at the club without necessarily needing my guidance (especially since I may not be familiar with the game they are bringing). This frees up my time, with students teaching the games, to work with students one-on-one to develop their game design ideas.