At our Adults Board Games Club this week we had some different people to last week so we played Energizer again, the three in a row game with the objective of making two different threes in a row.

The second game was Mastermind, the code breaking game with the coloured pegs, which is one of Anna’s favourites.

At Bletchley Juniors Codebreaking Club this week we transliterated Ancient Greek. Yes that is right, I had a group of 8 to 10 year olds enjoying an ancient language. I did a bit of simplification, but did not dumb it down. I believe in aiming high.

The activity was to decode some information about gods and goddesses, then match it to the correct picture. We ended with a few games of Greek Gods and Goddesses Bingo. Thanks to Deceptively Educational for putting this on their blog for others to use. To make it a little harder I did not call out the name of the god. Instead I called out ‘the goddess of rainbows’ and waited for someone to shout out ‘Iris’. All the children then found Iris on their cards. We played the first to make a row or column, and then the first to make a full house. Instead of calling out ‘Bingo!’ I asked them to call out the name of their favourite god or goddess. Playing this game was a really fun way for the children to reinforce their learning.

At our Adults Board Games Club this week we played Picaria Quad, the game we invented as a family in November 2018, and Tri-It!. We also played a new game for us: Energizer (Spear’s, 1984). Each player has three large and three small pieces of the same colour, and must get both sets in a three in a row. The large pieces move within the grid spaces, and the smaller pieces move on the intersections. Pieces can only move if they have energy units, which are the number of other pieces they are touching regardless of colour e.g. a large piece touching three smaller pieces can move three places. There are lots of three in a row games out there, but this is the only one we have played so far where the objective is to make two separate three in a rows to win.