So I was attempting to play a pdf board game with my class the other day, which I was finding most unsatisfactory and which they were politely putting up with. We were practicing “used to” and talking about all sorts of things we used to do in our childhood, which was of course, not particularly that far in the past for some of the students, but never mind.

I found working with an onscreen pdf that had been formatted to A4 portrait particularly annoying because of course my monitor and their displays are all landscape and even though I had done what I could to cut and past and crop and enlarge onto powerpoint beforehand, it was still all a bit shoddy, and frankly I felt a bit embarrassed.

So I have taken myself off in the cause of self-improvement and come up with this, which is (in my opinion at least) a much better way of doing the end of course grammar review than what was on the syllabus, though I’m sure not all would agree.

The game I came up with is relatively simple: there are up to six players / teams who have to get to the end of the 50 square board first. There is a six sided die that helps them do that and questions for them to answer – if they answer correctly and within the time limit they get to move ahead, if they fail they stay where they are. At various points they will be randomly prompted to push another player either forwards or backwards two spaces, just to add a little spice to the mix.

At the moment, it is teacher led, so you need to open it in your browser and share your screen / put it up on the IWB and you need to do all the actions for them (i.e. changing team names, clicking the die roll, moving things on etc). If you are in a classroom with an IWB, no doubt you can delegate some of this.

When an answer is given, you need to click next to move on – this is just to give you some time to review any wrong answers as necessary as you go.

One caveat – I rushed the generation of the question set, because I didn’t have a lot of time between learning a lot of new things about making all this, and when I needed to have it ready for the class. I have tested it with them and tweaked it, there were some questions where I thought, hang on – the answer key is off here, but wasn’t able to record which ones. I will be making notes, but if you spot any egregious errors, do please let me know! The questions on squares 1-40 are aimed at B1 / B1+ level – my students wanted the last ones to be more difficult, so squares 41 – 50 have questions aimed at B2.

Let me know what you think!

PS – I plan to do a few more of these as I go – I’ll be adding them all to the ELT Game Bank page at the top of the screen.