Tag Archives: board

Let’s Make Games: Play in the Pumpkin Patch


This week our class laid out board games. Based on a Halloween theme of a pumpkin patch, each student created a meandering path across a poster board, divided it into sections and filled it with four colors. We then decorated the board with pumpkins, gravestones and haunted houses. One child even made a pumpkin lake, a huge oval filled with pumpkins, which he thought was hilarious. Next week we'll make four-sided dice to roll and create a set of playing pieces from Crayola model magic.
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Mancala Games

Mancala is an ancient counting game based on the agricultural practice of sowing seeds. It is traditionally played with stones and wooden cups but here are a few digital versions:


Awele/Oware- Mancala uses a photo-realistic background of a large wooden Mancala board. This iOS game allows one or two players to compete.


Mancala FS5 is an iOS game with different skins for the game board, including the jewelry box seen here.


Mancala Snails: This version includes instructional levels to help understand the mechanics of the game. Unfortunately the stones are rendered as yellow snails and the uniform color across the board makes it difficult to count how many pieces are in each cup.


Novel Games Mancala has a rainbow colored set of stones, making things a bit easier to count. But turn down the volume. The music loop will have you pulling your hair out.


UPDATE: Play the new Mancala game I designed for the Keats Foundation here.

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Board


My game and mapping class is coming up in May at Hoboken HOLA and today I put together a sample game board to prep. One of my studio mates gave me a piece of photographic seamless paper so I figured I'd try enlarging the game board idea to full table size. I figure a 9'x4' piece of paper will keep 8 kids occupied drawing mazes. They would each draw a home base and five game spaces. Each section would connect to the next, forming a large loop of about 40 spaces. More