After deciding the goal of your game, it's time to gamestorm the best type of game to use to get your players to that goal. Will they work together against a common challenge? Create a strong deck to overcome an obstacle? Place workers on the board to gather key resources? These questions and more will help drive your decisions for which game type would fit best!

Social Studies - Gathering supplies from various natural resources in a society

Science - finding food, water, and shelter in an ecosystem

Math - Collect the symbols, numbers, and variables required to meet the formulas and equations needed to win

Math - Play cards to add up to totals of enemies on board

Social Studies - Build an industrial empire by playing resources and buying new technology to meet goals

ELA - Utilize the characters from a novel, short story, or non-fiction narrative as cards necessary to achieve an objective

Science - Create chemical compounds by combining like elements as a team

ELA - Each character in a narrative has a specific strength to contribute to solving a common problem in the storyline

Math - Work together with others to combine geometric shapes, numbers, and formulas to overcome an obstacle before time runs out

ELA - Create fake news, tweets, and hoaxes to fool your fellow players making their own

Science - Teams must draw a science term and get their team to guess it using gestures, play-doh, or word association

Social Studies - Each player attempts to create a movie title, analogy, or lyric about a historical event or person to impress the judge

Math - Use a combination of dice numbers and math symbols to move forward on a game board

ELA - Move around a board with a story chart to match up your cards with the correct location on the chart

Social Studies - Travel across a map of the world, collecting the necessary resources to build a successful nation

Math - Use a combination of number cards and math symbols to deplete your opponent’s health

Science - Deploy a variety of animals in the food chain to eliminate the other person’s based on the food chain

ELA - Characters from a novel or short story square off to reach the end goal first and eliminate the other players

Want to discover great games that demonstrate the various game types? Check out the games listed here - they are affordable, engaging, easy to learn, and help students and staff brainstorm ideas for creating their own games!