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I hosted my first session of this ten-week program in mid-December 2017, and given the holidays and my travel schedule, I'll be hosting on most Mondays until mid-March 2018. I can't claim to be an expert in children's game club organization after only a single session, but I've already learned a few lessons and thought I'd share them with you.
• Start with a plan: The Monday morning that the club would start, eight kids aged 6-12 had signed up to attend. (I had set a floor of age 6 to make things easier for myself.) I figured that I'd open with one or two games that all of them could play, then break them into two groups for smaller games afterwards. The club lasts only one hour, so we wouldn't have time for too many games, and since I had no idea which games they had previously played (except for my son, of course), I chose a dozen with simple rules that would ideally have them playing almost immediately.
For an opener, I chose Codenames. My wife Linda was attending as well and she knows the game, so she and I could serve as cluegivers and choose words — both to guess and as clues — that would be age appropriate. This game was a smash hit! The kids loved making wild and crazy suggestions that had no possible chance of being right, and they also loved it when they did choose correctly.
Giving clues is a bit harder as you're not necessarily sure what kids know at this age. I gave "Asia-2" as a clue to try to get my team to guess "Tokyo" and "Turkey". They guessed "Tokyo" immediately, but then one of them suggested "America" and suddenly they were almost all on Team America until another kid pointed out that Turkey is a country in Asia. Phew! Now I know who was paying attention for geography lessons. Linda gave a clue of "blood" at one point, and all the kids on her team chose "ketchup" as an answer instead of the adjacent "shark". Kids can't stay away from ketchup, can they?
• Be ready to veer from that plan: Two more kids joined the group right as the club got started that afternoon. This wasn't a problem for Codenames since you can have teams of any size, but it helped doom my next choice of game: Pairs. Pairs is labeled for 2-8 players, but for some reason I decided to go ahead with it anyway, with me serving as dealer for all ten young players.
Not a good choice! Not only was the action spread across a long, narrow table (as opposed to a pleasingly round table where everyone can see what everyone else is doing), but that game is a hangout design instead of a centerpiece; it's a grandma game (in my terminology) as it happens in the background while everyone has tea and cookies. I was trying to make it the focal point of the activity, but everyone was just staring at their one or two cards, then someone would randomly go out and they'd start all over again. Game abandoned! Let's move on to something else at two tables.
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Go Go Gelato! and children who shall remain anonymous
• Don't worry about winning: Some of the kids wanted to play Codenames again, so Linda led them in that game, serving as cluegiver for both teams. I took out Go Go Gelato!, one of the real-time pattern-building games from Roberto Fraga and Blue Orange Games. I set up three kids with cones and gelato, then took the fourth set to explain the rules. Another kid asked at least three times within the one-minute rule explanation whether he could take the fourth seat because he loved the look of the game so much! Yes, fine!
I had mentioned that the first player to collect five cards wins the game, but they mostly just shoved the card to the side after they finished, then jumped into the next challenge. They didn't care about winning the game; they just wanted to beat one another in each individual challenge. They played and played and played some more, with one kid leaving early when their parents showed to pick them up, and someone else jumped into that seat immediately.
The same thing was true for Stick Stack, a dexterity game that takes less than a minute to explain, with players trying to set up a teetering stack of sticks so that someone else knocks it over and scores penalty points. No one was keeping score; they were just having fun balancing things and watching others get shaky over and over again.
I'll be sure to bring this game back next time (along with Codenames), and I'll pack Dr. Eureka or Dr. Microbe as well. A friend of mine ran a board game club at his school for six weeks earlier in 2017, and he said one of the great things that happens is that some kids step into the role of teacher when someone new wants to learn a game that they already know, giving you a chance to focus on those who want to learn something new or those uncomfortable in the role of teacher.
• Enlist assistants: Before we started that day, Linda and I talked about rules for the club — no interrupting others, be good winners, treat the players and the games with respect — and we shared those rules with everyone when we started. What's more, we chose someone to be the rules guru for the day. This student was supposed to be in charge of making sure everyone paid attention and did what they should do, but beyond that we had chosen someone who seemed quiet in order to encourage them to interact more with others. Some kids naturally jump in and participate, being loud enough that others can't avoid hearing them, but others might need a hand to feel more like part of the group.
Stick Stack and kids whose parents have given me clearance to post their images
Okay, that's not a lot to go on should you propose to run a board game club at your children's school, but it's a start, and I'll be building on that foundation over the next nine sessions, as curious to see what I learn from them as I am to see what I can bring to the table myself.
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