It was our last session of the term, so we asked the children to request their favourite games from this term. We played Mastermind, Ghost Blitz and Frog Rush. I brought in one new game: Foxy (MB, 1977). There is a 6 x 6 board, with 32 shallow holes (the corners do not have holes). There are 11 purple wooden discs, which are randomly distributed across the board. Each player has a tube which they fill with 11 wooden discs (one player has blue, the other yellow) and position on opposite corners. (I am always blue by the way, even when playing a child). Players take it in turns to move their tube in any direction, over any number of spaces, but they cannot turn direction mid-move. As the tube moves over an empty hole a disc drops down. The first player to empty their tube is the winner. A good strategy is to try and block the other player’s tube with your own tube, limiting their options on their next turn.

At the end of the session we explained to the children that in the new year we introducing a new after school club: Bletchley Juniors Codebreaking Club. We had a brief chat about the role of Bletchley Park in the Second World War. We do hope the children return for this new club, as we have enjoyed their company and we can see how much enjoyment they get from playing games and exercising their minds.

 

We played a few different 5 in a row games this week at our Board Games Club for Adults. We have played Pente, Pentago, Cavendish and Cambio before, so brought them back: some people played them for the first time; others played them as a recap and enjoyed reflecting on the similarities and differences between the games.

We played Swish (ThinkFun, 2011), a game of visual perception, for the first time with the adults. There are 60 transparent cards; each card has some combination of balls and hoops on it, in different positions, with these shapes being in four colours. A Swish is two or more cards that can be laid on top of one another in a way that every ball fits in a hoop of the same colour. Flipping and rotating are allowed. To start the game, 16 cards are laid out in a 4×4 grid. Players simultaneously try to create a Swish, keeping the cards used, with new cards laid to fill in the gaps in the grid. The player with the most cards when the deck runs out is the winner. Some people enjoyed this game more than others did. We reflected on how different games use different parts of the brain, and appeal to some people more than others. Anna said she wanted to attached probes to people’s brains to see the different parts firing up. Strangely no-one volunteered for this assignment.