Geography Board Game

Barnes & Noble (national bookseller chain) had one of their clearance sales and I bought “Thousand Places To See Before Your Die” game for 50% off. My family and I finally sat down yesterday and played. Here is a quick review.

The game is intended for ages 7 to adult. I believe you can play it with a little younger children if they pair up with a teenager or adult. The game comes with a a world map board and “Destination Cards” and “Movement Cards”. The destination cards have a beautiful photographs of a certain landmark in the world and are divided into different zones of the world (not continents).

Each player is dealt 5 cards (destination & movement cards included). The objective of the game is to start out at a spot closest to their city of birth and visit 5 destinations in different zones. The first player to return to their city of birth wins the game.

Sounds easy? Not so fast. You need to have (or learn) to recognize/guess where the photos of the destination cards are from. They are on the table with the photo side up. Since you will need to have visited five zones before finishing it can get tricky trying to decide to pick up the destination card from the pile or roll the die.

I watched my children trying to guess the location and then look on the map trying to guess the zone that location might be in. My guess is that everyone will get pretty good at placing destinations on the map if you play long enough.

Once a player has reached a destination, the card is turned over and the text on the back is read aloud with tidbits about that location.Very cool! We should have a laptop next time we play on the table and have someone in charge of finding the location on Google Earth.

I am wrecking my brain to think about how to use this game in the classroom. In groups… in Google Earth or Google Maps adding the placemarks in different colors representing the different groups. Use the projector as the game board.