Life-size Tapple
With a busier year this year, I wasn’t able to pull together a Boda Borg, but we did play a game of Life-size Tapple! Over the holidays we played Tapple with family. In Tapple, there is a circular contraption in the middle of the table with 20 levers on it, each with a different letter of the alphabet (no Q, U, V, X, Y, or Z). Players are given a category, then each player sequentially has to think of an item in the category, name it, and press down an unpressed lever corresponding to its first letter before the timer goes off. Letter levers are reset after each round is over.
In our life-size variant, we have a large foam alphabet floor tile puzzle, so we spread it out in a circle on the ground. The prompt was to think of something meaningful that happened to you from the past year, and stand on a letter representing that. For example J for a new Job, B for celebrating your Birthday, or E for getting Engaged. Instead of going sequentially, we all scrambled to find an empty letter at the same time. Then we went around and shared why we’d picked that letter, then removed the foam letter from its tile to show it had been used.
In the next round, the goal was to pick letters that hadn’t been used, but players were also allowed to reuse tiles too, if they had something they wanted to share, but couldn’t match it to an unused tile. We set the harder letters off to the side. Players were allowed to use these too, but it was more of a bonus if we could get those, rather than needing to complete them to win.
It was a fun way to reflect on the year, share with each other, and even our 3-year old was able to play!