First After-School Games Club of 2018-19. We started with Stay Alive (Milton Bradley, 1976), Anna’s favourite game from childhood (it took Debbie a while to find it online, based on Anna’s description of a game where “marbles fall through holes”). Stay Alive is subtitled “the ultimate survival game”. Players pull slides to open and close holes, dropping other player’s marbles down an open hole and out of the game. The winner is the last player with a marble on the board. The children were really engaged trying to work out what effect pulling a slide would have. We ended up playing it three times.
The second game today was Push (Spears, 1977). This is another game about trying to work out the effect of moving a row. This is two-player game but we played in pairs. One side has the yellow balls, and the other side 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 teams were evenly matched, and as we were running out of time, we changed the objective to making a 2×3 rectangle instead.
I completely forgot to tell the children about next week’s game: Space Faces, Debbie’s favourite.