Mario Party Board Game

Attached at the bottom are links to the slides for the board, rules sheet, stars, and slides I used to explain the game. Feel free to copy and edit based on your needs/ideas.

This is an easy to play (difficult to explain) Mario Party board game for students to have fun while practicing a target grammar point. This also requires a lot of materials. If you don't have a bunch of UNO decks you could use regular cards and change colors to suits. You could also print out decks of blank cards with colors.

Materials for each group: One whiteboard/marker/eraser, one gameboard, one rule sheet, two stars, one die, one UNO deck.

Playing upbeat Nintendo music during this activity also makes the classroom environment more fun.

For explaining, I found it best to explain one part at a time in English and then have the JTE translate if students didn't fully understand. I used slide 4 on the attached explanation slides as a live demonstration.

DIRECTIONS:

• Students take out an eraser or something small to use as a game piece then get into groups of 5.

• One student from each group comes to the front and grabs the materials. It helps to prepare before and put all the materials needed for one group on a whiteboard so they can just grab it.

• On the whiteboards, students make three columns (names/coins/stars). Students will keep track of their coins and stars.

• Students play Janken to decide the order (normal Mario Party order rules with the dice roll were confusing for students).

• First, students will roll the dice twice and put the stars at the matching numbers.

• First student rolls the dice, moves the appropriate number of spaces, collects their coins, and takes an UNO card.

• Based on the color of the card, students must say a sentence about that topic using whatever target grammar you're teaching. Red=School, Blue=Animal, Green=Food, Yellow=Holiday. Wildcard=Any topic. In my lesson we were using passive voice, so for example, Red=The chair was broken by a student, Green=The fish was eaten by a bird, etc. After saying their sentence, the next student can go.

• After everyone has had one turn, they play a minigame for more coins. They can either: roll the dice (highest number wins), play Janken, or flip an UNO card and quickly say a word matching the color of the card (Ex: red=apple). 1st place gets 8 coins, 2nd: 6 coins, 3rd: 4 coins, 4th; 2 coins, 5th: 0 coins. After the minigame, the next round starts.

• The goal of the game is to buy as many stars as possible by the end of class. The person with the most is the winner. In the case of a tie, it then goes to most coins between the tied players.

• Stars cost 10 coins (started with 20 coins but seemed to expensive and many games ended with 0 stars purchased).

• Students do not need to land on the (!) space to buy the star, they can go past it and still buy it. (very important to explain).

• After a student buys a star they roll the dice and move it to the new number.

I didn't bother explaining any of the event spaces on the rules sheet as it would be information overload. Just walk around when they're playing and if students land on one then explain it.

Feel free to change rules as you see fit.

LINKS:
Explanation slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1b0PbMnwvEfZjiUQeHeA6GwojAV9bjPUz2pdefELgv2Q/edit?usp=sharing
Board: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1z9YakyBN4b6dsLZ2q_LMvxosLivGD4vU8u0TzmN2l9o/edit?usp=sharing
Rules sheet: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1g9ZGZzIspafamCHDTzsy_zkEGctYNBiEO24Zu88-okM/edit?usp=sharing
Stars: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DqxjsqjQ6brktJ3pVN7zEWT5_4DysUu9dfQ6dOj-NNk/edit?usp=sharing