Teen Battleship Tournament

Howdy
For me Pinterest is a trove of programing temptation.  I have seen some great idea about making giant size board games.  The one that caught my eye was a great big battleship game.  I decided to have a table top sized battleship tournament with my teens.  We played for an hour and a half.  If I had let them stay longer I think we could have played for at least two hours.  Our program was in the evening so eventually we had to close the library. 

Room set up before the program.

Individual battleship set up with 
cell phone and manga novel 
to keep the board from rolling up. 

The basic set up was 1 table for supplies like the laptop, makers and game boards, 1 table for drinks and snacks and 6 tables for gaming. Each table had a divider to prevent peaking. These are made of sheets of foam board.  I cut 2 or 3 long notches in the bottom and added cardboard feet. Each teen got the following -  2 ft square battleship board made from newsprint to track their ships and the opponents guesses, a marker, a mini board to track their own guesses and a fleet of paper ships consisting of a battleship, aircraft carrier, destroyer, submarine and cruiser.  I had measured the board so each square is 1 inch so the boats are the corresponding length to cover the correct number of squares, ie the battleship is 5 inches long and an inch wide. The boats are made of black construction paper with staples. I had planned for 7 tables of gaming but the room seemed so crowded that I just set up 6 tables for gaming.  It took me a few days to make all 35 boats but only because I made them while at the desk so I had to stop and start a lot. I originally used a bracket in a word document to track the players.  My teens insisted we had to have a randomizer to make things fair and merrily found one online. I projected the bracket on the screen so that we could see who to play next. We had an odd number of teens that night so I got to play a few rounds myself.

Teens waiting to yell "You Sunk My Battleship."

I totally underestimated how excited the game play would get and we all got quite loud.  At some points we couldn't hear well.  I also had a few teens who had never played the game before so I had to break away a few times to explain the rules again.  To make the game go faster the traditional way to play is with 7 boats instead of 5.  I think I just got tired of making boats so I cut back to 5. 

I was able to pack up all the game pieces in a box and I'll stow them for a later program.  We are going to play large version of chess and checkers next month. 

Laura

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