Today, we’re taking a look at Bamboozle’s new board game, Snakes and Ladders. If you’re teaching children, then you know that games are one of the biggest parts of the classroom. So, this is why I wanted to review Bamboozle’s new Snakes and Ladders game because we’ve been playing it this week, and our students love it.
Getting started
To get started, all you need to do is go to Bamboozle’s website and make an account. We just find a game that we’d like to play. Here, I’ve got one on clothes, accessories, and colors. So, the first thing we have to do is choose how many teams. Now, it really depends on how many students you have in your classroom and how competitive they are. Remember to make sure that you’re splitting up the groups into teams that are fair. If we make four teams, we get to choose between a cat, unicorn, another cat, and an elephant. But we can change the characters. You can choose between animals such as foxes and a cows, and even aliens!
Game options
Let’s just check out the options real quick. One of the great things about this is that there are a lot of options here. So, a small game—sometimes if I’ve not got much time left in the class, I might choose a small game, which just reduces the board. Real dice is really cool. If you do have dice in the classroom, then instead of rolling the virtual dice, you can actually have that off and use real dice.
How to play
Team one goes first, and we just click on the dice and let’s see. Now, before we see what the dice rolled on, we have to answer this question. For example:
“What color and object is this?”
Once I answer the question, I can see what I rolled. I rolled a six, of course!
So, in this game we’ve got the snakes, which are actually pencils, and the rulers, which are the ladders, and the stars are power-ups. Make sure that your students are using English to describe what’s happening, again, so what I mean is the meta-language. For example, “Whose turn is it?” “It’s my turn.” “It’s your turn.” “It’s his turn.” “It’s her turn.” “Who is winning?” “Who is losing?” “What number did you roll?”
Baamboozle for the win
As you can imagine, I’m a big fan of Bamboozle. I’ve already written 2 posts about this website because whenever I’m walking through my school and I’m looking into the window and looking at what the students are doing in class, more often than not, the games that are being played are using Bamboozle.
I’ve got a tutorial that goes over all the options that you have when you’re using Bamboozle, just right here. And I’ve got a second one which goes into some practical ideas on how to use Bamboozle in your classroom, which is just right here.
Bamboozle has a lot of games that are free and a lot that are not free. So, how much would it cost for you to start playing Snakes and Ladders in your classroom tomorrow? If you pay for a whole year of Bamboozle, then it’s going to cost you €3.99 a month, or you could do €5.99 a month if you just want to pay monthly. Remember, this price does not only get you Snakes and Ladders, it gets you all of the other Bamboozle Plus options that are available. We could also play the new Double Vision game. We could play Story Dice, Four in a Row, or Connect Four. We can play Tic-Tac-Toe or Noughts and Crosses. We can play a memory game, Bingo, you know, so it’s not only Snakes and Ladders that comes with paying for Bamboozle.
Thank you for reading about another great game site that you can use in your English language classroom.