Today we held our first event at Lord Louis Library. We had a space in the children’s library for 90 minutes, set up several tables and chairs, and put out lots of games for people to try. Games from around the world included Picaria, Five Field Kono and Mancala. Games from our 1970s/80s childhood included Foxy, Stay Alive and Rubik’s Race. We also had Bridg-It, Joggle, 3D Noughts and Crosses and Spot It Jr.! Animals. We set aside two tables for the children to practice Ghost Blitz (versions 1 and 2), in preparation for the 2019 Ghost Blitz Championship. My friend could not have put it better when she said this game is fabulous for the children’s cognitive development. Read one of my previous blog posts for a full description of the game.

As we were approaching the end of the event, I decided it was time to start the 2019 Ghost Blitz Championship. Six children entered, all aged from 8 to 11. I had chosen 20 cards from Ghost Blitz 1 which were all of the type where both items are the wrong colour. This was an individual timed challenge, with each child competing against the stopwatch to be the fastest to get all 20 cards right. The winning child had an impressive time of 65 seconds. I gave prizes to all six children. The look on their faces as they received their prizes and applause was genuine and heart-warming, and made the whole event worth the effort of organisation and planning that went into it.

We enjoyed the opportunity to meet new families and show people the games that we enjoy so much. Thanks to the Friends of Lord Louis Library for their help in publicising this event.

For our third week of Bletchley Juniors we tackled the Caesar cipher. I started with a very brief overview of who Julius Caesar was, including looking at a map of the Roman Empire (any excuse to get a map out). I explained that Caesar shifted each letter forward by 3 (A becomes D) in order to send coded messages. I wrote out the alphabet on the whiteboard, all on one line. As a group we encoded the plaintext ‘julias caesar’  as MXOLXV FDHVDU; we decoded the ciphertext ZDV ERUQ LQ URPH as ‘was born in rome’ by shifting each letter back by 3. I gave every child the opportunity to both encode and decode a letter.

I then showed the children a Caesar cipher wheel, explaining that it could do both the adding and subtracting for them, saving time. I gave each child a cardboard sheet with the blank template of the inner and outer wheels printed on it. The children wrote the alphabet on both wheels, cut them out and pinned them together. I showed them how to set the inner wheel to a shift of 3. I gave them each a ciphertext to decode, which took the form of a statement which was either true or false e.g. there are five different chess pieces (false, there are six).  Each child was able to successfully decode their ciphertext. I then asked them to use their wheel to encode a message to someone in the group in ciphertext, then swap over and decode into plaintext. There was just about enough time for this before the session was over. As with the first week, the children enjoyed the chance to make something with their hands, as well as learning more about ciphers.

At our Board Games Club for Adults we introduced them to two new games. The first was Spot It Jr.! Animals (Asmodee, 2012), a beginner’s version of Dobble. There are 31 circular cards. Each card features six animals. No two cards are the same. The size of the animal may differ on each card. You can take any two cards and they will have one animal in common. The first person to spot and shout out this animal wins the card. We actually played the version called The Well where both players have 15 cards in a pile and one card is placed in the middle, face-up. Players search for the match between this card and the one on top of their pile. The winner is the fastest to get rid of all their cards. It was great to see our members get up to speed with the concept so quickly.

The other new game for our members was Ghost Blitz (Zoch, 2010), a great game of visual perception and one of Debbie’s favourites. Dobble is a good game for spotting the same object on two cards. Ghost Blitz takes this a step further by asking you to find the object which is not on the card. It requires a process of elimination at speed to find the right object. It stretches the brain in different directions, making it great fun.

There are five wooden items: a white ghost, a green bottle, a grey mouse, a blue book and a red chair. There is a deck of cards, each card showing two items, with one or both items in the wrong colour. A card is turned, then players either shout out or grab the “correct” item. If one item is the correct colour, players need to grab that correctly coloured item. If both items are the wrong colour, then players look for the item and colour not on the card e.g. if the card shows a green ghost and a red mouse, the answer is the item which is not the ghost, not the mouse, not green and not red: it must be the blue book. The player with the most cards when the deck runs out is the winner. Our members found it challenging to grasp the idea of their being two types of card (one item of the correct colour OR both items of the wrong colour), and it gave them a good mental work out. They were pleased to return to the relative simplicity of Spot It afterwards.

We also played Halma again, a game invented in 1883-1884 by an American surgeon called George Howard Monks. The name comes from the Greek work meaning to jump. This game was requested by one of our members who remembered it from his childhood but had not played it since.  The winner is the first player to move all their pieces from their home “camp” to the opposite “camp”. Movement is either by step or by jump. A step is from one square to an adjacent square in any direction. A jump can be over your own piece or your opponent’s piece, to an empty square beyond; multiple jumps are allowed; steps and jumps cannot be combined. I thought I was being clever by making seven consecutive jumps in one move, but my opponent made eight consecutive jumps! It was a close victory for me.

 

I started our second week of Bletchley Juniors Codebreaking Club with some pinprick codes. I had prepared by cutting out some newspaper articles and finding some jokes and punchlines that I thought the children would like. (“Why did the chicken cross the playground?” “To get to the other slide”. Admit it, that one is not that bad). The intention was to give one child the joke and another child the punchline. I used a pin to prick a hole above letters in the newspaper article which corresponded to letters in the joke.

I gave one article to the children and asked them to see how the message was hidden. None of them could: when you hold the article and look down you cannot see the tiny pinpricks. I asked the children to hold it up to the light. One child said they could see ‘sparkles’: when light is behind the newspaper each pinprick is revealed. However, things did not work quite as well as I had planned. When I tested this at home using my ceiling light fitting, it worked perfectly. But the light is very different in the school hall: the ceiling is much higher, the light fittings are different, and it was tricky for the children to see all the pinpricks. We went over to the doors, and were able to get just enough light through the windows (it is January) to read the messages, giving the children a bit of help. The lesson I learnt was to test things like this in the school environment first, as I cannot assume that something that works at home can be replicated in the school hall. On the other hand, the fact that the messages were hard to read does prove that the pinprick code is a useful way to hide a message from someone who does not know where to look for it.

The second part of the session used a book cipher. I had borrowed several copies of the same novel from Year 6. I had written a message for each child, then encoded the message as a book cipher. Each letter was encoded as a set of numbers e.g. 17, 3, 4, where 17 is the page number, 3 is the row, and 4 means count four letters along starting on the left. I wrote out the ciphers in a long list, one per row. After prompting them to write each letter out again along one row, each child was able to decode their message. I think they enjoyed having a message that was personal to them, based on their interests. We ended the session by reading out the jokes from earlier. I am pleased to report the chicken joke got the biggest laugh.

We introduced two new games at our Adult Board Games Club. The first was 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. 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. Our members enjoyed the mechanism of moving the tube across the board: this was quite different to any other game they had played.

The other new game was Push (Spears, 1977). This is another game about trying to work out the effect of moving a row. One player has the yellow balls, and the other player has the black balls. The winner is the first to make a 3×3 square of their colour. Players push the balls a row at a time, and they keep pushing rows as long as the ball that comes out is their colour; if not, the other player takes a turn. The same player won both the games we played, with their 3×3 square in the same position both times: what are the odds of that happening?