Battleship Chess: Fun Without the Video Part

Okay, here's a crazy thought. Third through Fifth graders came to the Hayden Library to play chess. Even more strange is that we actually played Battleship Chess, which is a fun variation of the classic game.

Now, I know what you might be thinking: did they have a good time? Were they entertained? I would say they absolutely were, and even more, they learned something in the process.

Most of the participants were familiar with chess but didn't play too often, so I had the chance to break down the regular rules of chess play for them. Once they had a decent grasp of the game, we put a divider down the center of the boards, had the players put their pieces anywhere on their half, then removed the divider and had them go at it with normal chess rules (this was the Battleship variation).

In addition to chess, we also had Sorry! and Battleship available to play. Both games had kids laughing and enjoying their stay.

When I've done game programs for this group in the past, I had video games as the main attraction with board games on the side to fill your time. But as I kept doing that, I noticed that some kids gravitated toward the board games more than the video games, and that gave me this idea; how about I do some programs that are strictly based on board games and see what happens?

Battleship Chess was the first program like this, and it was a very encouraging experiment. Moving forward, I'm going to bounce between a video game program and a board game program and see what we see. Love live games!

What Wii Sports Taught Me

Some things I found out while doing our monthly gaming program:

• When you have fifteen kids at a program, having more than 1 Wii is a good idea.
• Motion Plus is required to play Wii Sports: Resort.
• My projector just doesn't work with video game consuls.

But, other than that, we had a really great time. Played some boxing, some baseball, and some bowling on Wii Sports. Meanwhile, there were random card games, Battleship, and chinese checkers going on.

Ultimately, I didn't think the program would get big enough to require two Wiis, so I only found one. But, I turned out to be wrong. This is a fantastic problem to have, too many kids, but it meant we didn't get as much time with the game as each participant would have liked.

Even though I'm definitely going to be getting more Wiis for next month's program, I was really impressed with the patience of the kids that came. Each of them had time for only one sport on the game, but they were generous by letting others go, and spending the waiting time playing other games with each other.

So, even though my lesson was learned, we still had a really great time at the program, and I still encourage folks to get a gaming program going; even if you only have one Wii to work with :)