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.

Today we held a Children’s Easter Challenge event at Lord Louis Library in Newport. We set out ten challenges, comprising puzzles, board games, code-breaking and finding hidden information in the non-fiction section of the children’s library.

All the children went home with a small prize. We were pleased to meet so many new people, and we had some very positive feedback on our event.

At Bletchley Juniors Codebreaking Club this week we used a spiral code. The activity was the food chain. I encoded a chain of either three, four or five plants/animals/birds in the wrong order. After they had decoded the creatures, I gave the children pictures which they had to match to the creature, then put in the correct order. As the children became more confident I gave them spirals which went in a different direction. I even sneaked in a bit of Ancient Greek, explaining the meaning of phytoplankton and zooplankton.

We played Chinese Chequers again at our Adults Board Games Club this week, due to a change in people attending. We also played Zenix, a chain building game, and 3D Noughts and Crosses.