Activities for Kids: Beast Hunter Extraordinaire
Hey, how’s homeschooling going for you? For us, the answer is… not great! Nico is highly distractible and home has many attractive distractions. I decided he needed a project that would help develop some academic skills without necessarily feeling like schoolwork and remembered that in sixth grade we had to make biome board games and it was an absolute blast. So last night I asked him to start thinking of some board game ideas. Think about a theme, and how you want the gameplay to work, I said. And man, did he come through.
For this project you will need:
Posterboard or cardstock or a file folder or just plain paper
Pencils and crayons or markers
Probably some dice you scavenged from another board game
Step 1: Brainstorm! Nico wanted his game to have traps, curses, combat items, and monsters. I suggested making the whole thing card-based, but he really wanted a game board, so we decided it would work like this: You move along a board, collecting curses and combat items, and occasionally falling into traps on a quest to defeat a monster. It is called Beast Hunter Extraordinaire.
Step 2: Get specific. Nico plays more video games than I would like, and kept trying to make things really complicated. Like, way too complicated. At one point he wanted the curses to be tokens and there was a boss curse and damage points and someday this kid is going to be super great at Dungeons and Dragons but we are not to that level of game design yet. We simplified things a bit, and here is how it works: At the beginning of the game, players draw a monster card (zombie samurai, yeti, UFO, dragon, or zombie military fighter pilot), each with specific combat items required to defeat it. They roll a die to move around the board, landing on trap spaces where they may lose a turn or have to go back a couple spaces, and on spaces that let them draw a card. The cards are either combat items needed to defeat the monster or curse cards that can be used against other players (Like, Every time you roll a 3, you have to go back one space). When you reach the center of the board, or the combat arena, you either have the items required and defeat the monster, or you are blasted back several spaces to continue your quest. First person to defeat a monster wins.
Step 3: Start creating. Sketch out the board and the cards, then go crazy doing fancy lettering and illustrating. Nico is really resistant to writing projects in class, but he was so enthusiastic about working on the combat item cards. We’re probably going to take a couple more days to finish this one up, but we had a great time spending a couple hours writing and not watching TV.
Let us know what you and your kids come up with!
