Game 3 by Szimi

 License plate game

I used to play this game with my family every time we traveled and wanted the time to pass quicker. We used to play this in Hungarian. I wanted to create a game using our experience and have fun while practicing the target language.

Preliminaries

Number of players: any

Age/ Proficiency Level: any

Preparation Time: no time needed

Play Time: 10-15 minutes

 

Preparation

It can be played without any preparation, but if you want to make sure, you can make some cards with license plate characters. If you are not creative or do not want to spend much time thinking about it, you can write your family’s license plates or just look out the window and write what you see.

Object of the game

The goal of the game is to write the most original words using those characters and get the highest points.

Roles

This is a player vs player, or group vs group game, which means that everyone (every pair) wants to win and collect the highest number of points. All the students are players excluding one who is the host.

Rules of Play

The game can be played individually or in pairs. The host will look out the window and search for a license plate. If there are no cars or the host cannot see them, he/she can come up with three random characters (or draw one card). The players should make as many existing words with that three characters as they can. The order of the characters should not be changed. The host writes the characters to the board and starts a one-minute timer or a minute-glass. The players start writing as the timer starts. After the time is up, each player reads a word from their list. If other players have the same word on their list, everyone that has that word crosses it out. The reading goes until all the words are said from the lists. Each word that only appeared on one list is worth a point. Each player reads out their original words again to make sure there are no similar words.

The host can be changed after each round or can stay the same for the whole game. The number of rounds should be decided by the teacher based on how much time they have to play this game.

Scoring

Each word appeared only once worth a point.

Based on the teacher’s opinion, players can also get points if their words are more difficult, rare, etc. even if they appeared on more than one list.

Alternative

·        The order of the characters can be switched. (easier)
 In the case of older students, the license plates can be their own or their family’s license plates.

Example

The license plate is ELT
Some possible words: ELemenT(ary), mELT, fELT, …