Verbivores (practise English)

Verbivores is a tabletop serious game in which teams of three or four students defend their school bus from zombies by conjugating verbs. I developed the game to help my elementary level ESL / EFL (English as a second / foreign language) students practise the past simple (regular and irregular) in a motivating context. Suddenly, they can't get enough of conjugating verbs!

You can read about the full pedagogical thinking behind the game in my 2017 thesis “Gamification - Using game design and game elements in the EFL classroom”, available at bibliotc.lu, chapter 5.5.

These are the rules of Verbivores (v5):

A group of zombies is attacking your school bus! They like soft brains. Keep your brain fit, or the zombies will eat it!

1 How to be a hero

· Form a team of 3 – 5 heroes. Only you can protect your friends on the bus.

· On a table, put the 3 dice ,
the bus  and all of the cards .

· Each hero puts one pen  around the bus to make walls and one zombie   outside the walls. The walls protect you and your bus.

· The example here is for 3 heroes.

2 How to survive

· Defend your bus: conjugate all the verbs: zombies only eat soft and lazy brains. Every time you use a verb, your brain becomes stronger.

· Use teamwork: the heroes win together when all the zombies are healed and your bus is safe again.

· Danger! The heroes lose together if the zombies attack a hero with no wall.

3 How to fight

Zombies like fresh brains so the zombie group attacks the youngest hero first.

1. Roll the die  with the numbers.

: Zombie attack! Look at “Wrong”.
-: Use this verb from the top card to defend the bus.

2. Roll the other dice to get a person and form. Now conjugate the verb in the tense at the top of the card.

3. Turn the card to check your answer.

Correct: The zombies don’t attack. Build a new wall.  Use it for yourself or another hero. A hero can have many walls.

Or heal a zombie.    Hearing correct English brings the zombie’s brain back to life. It is now a student and goes inside the walls.

Wrong: The zombies break a wall. Take away one of your pens. If there is no wall when the zombies attack, your team loses.

4. If you took a card, put it in the box. The group of zombies goes clockwise ⟳ to attack the next hero.

4 How to be awesome

There are so many zombies! When your brains are strong enough, you can start the next round with more zombies than before. Will you survive?

Instructions for teachers:

1. A team consists of 3 (ideal) or 4 (ok) players.
2. Prepare the cards and rules like this:
a. Use thick paper
b. Two-sided / duplex: yes
c. Short-edge binding
d. Scale: 100% (by default most printers will try and reduce this to something like 97%)
e. Print enough copies for your classroom.
f. Use a stack paper trimmer to cut the cards.
3. 3D-print one of each die per team (1x pronouns, 1x form, 1x numbers).
4. Get one school bus token per team. Here's a link to some models on Printables: https://www.printables.com/search/models?q=school%20bus (Or print one on paper.)
5. Make a dozen or so paper zombie tokens per team.
 

You can introduce the topic of zombies in a lesson some time before introducing Verbivores to your class. Make it clear to the students that they have the epic task of defending other students from the zombie apocalypse.
The cooperative element consists in the learners’ ability to use strategy: if one member of their team is attacked and unprotected, the whole team fails. After each successful move, the learners must decide whether they want to do what’s best for them individually or what’s best for the team.
After each game that a team survives they can increase the tally of healed zombies on the blackboard.

There is an animated macOS/iOS Keynote presentation file in the ZIP. It uses the following fonts (but is functional without them):

Typo Round https://www.dafont.com/typo-round.font

Gill Sans

Helvetica

Helvatica Neue