Luma World’s approach to learning through play aligns with contemporary educational theories that emphasize active engagement, problem-solving, and hands-on experiences as effective learning methods. Their games are designed to be age-appropriate, culturally relevant, and engaging for children, potentially making them a popular choice for parents and educators seeking to supplement traditional education methods with interactive learning tools.

Ludogogy has had the opportunity to play six of Luma World’s most popular titles, so here is a mammoth-sized review of all six.

Galaxy Raiders

for age 9+, 30mins, 2 – 4 players – A space-based game where players are trying to capture new planets and moons, while stopping other players from doing the same.

Teaches: Number operations, mental maths, resource management, long-term planning, reverse engineering and problem solving.

Galaxy Raiders consists of a number of hexagonal ‘planet boards’, marker pegs in four colours, an operation die, which shows all four basic maths operators and wildcard, cards with numbers on, ‘power cards’, which allow you to take actions which influence the game, and player console mats.

One more planet board than the number of players is used, and the winner is the first player to win two planet boards.

Players win a planet board by first ‘capturing’ the moons and then the planet. Each board has four moons and one planet, each with a target number on them.

On their go, a player rolls the die and uses that operator, and two of the number cards on their (openly displayed) player console, to achieve the target number on a moon or a planet (only after all four moons have been captured). They may then place a peg on that number position.

Power cards can be used to ‘Evict’ another player’s peg, ‘Replace’ another player’s peg with their own or to be able to use the ‘Any Number’ wild card in their calculation.

There are several additional rules around placing pegs and using power cards, which are dependent on game state (e.g. you can only replace someone in a planet if you have captured one of its moons), and it is these additional rules that make this more than just a game of mental arithmetic, and into one that requires strategic planning. This provides enough challenge for the older target age group, and will be fun also for adults.

The combination of the requirement for some quite complex thinking skills and a competitive ‘battleground’ will ensure that this game is replayable for some time to come.

The game is pitched at the 9+ age group and is very suitable for children at that age.  The planning and problem solving are the more complex aspects of the game, so it could be also be played in a ‘team’ format with younger children, with the younger child doing the calculations, and maybe an adult or older child taking the strategic planning role.

Overall an excellent game for school or home, to polish up those mental maths skills.

Crafty Puggles

for age 6+, 30mins, 2 – 4 players – Cute mole-like creatures attempt to be the first to reach hidden treasure by burrowing under the grounds of a stately home. A tile-placement and path-building game.

Teaches: Basic fractions, mental maths, pattern recognition, critical thinking, motor skills, creativity, planning & strategy

Crafty Puggles consists of a treasure game board on which square tiles are laid to create a path to the treasure. The square tiles are split into quadrants which are either mud (passable path) or grass (which block the path),and therefore also represent the fractions ¼, (a quarter mud, three quarters grass), ½ (50/50 mud and grass) and ¾ (a quarter mud, three quarters grass).

Each player also has their own ‘den mat’ where they can ‘bank’ tiles, and grow and use a ‘Puggle Boost’ feature, which allows them to play actions which affect their own or their opponent’s progress.

A fraction die is thrown to indicate which tile a player will take from the fraction. Each player is attempting to navigate from one corner of the board to the centre, and is therefore working within a quarter of the game.

An action die is also rolled and allows the player to; place a tile on an empty space on the game board (to, hopefully, extend your path), rotate a tile, either your own to improve, or your opponent’s to block their progress, move your puggle one step along the ‘Boost’, or move a ‘Hound’ playing piece (a blocker) to any blank space on the board, or to a tile showing the fraction you also threw.

The different mechanics of this game combine to provide a fun, engaging experience for young players, with just the right balance of acting to progress your own position and being able to use ‘take-that’ actions to mess with your opponent’s plans.

Playing this game will definitely flex skills in patterns recognition and in planning and strategy. The possible combinations of the two dice mean that players have to consider carefully from a large number of different play options, what will best move them towards their goal, encouraging critical and creative thinking.

The fractions offered in this game are quite limited, but that is appropriate for the target age group, and is more than made up for by the opportunities for strategic planning.

The fact that there are many combinations of possible actions, e.g. from the dice, and from the five possible options when you activate a Puggle Boost means that there is considerable replayability in this game, and it will keep young players coming back.

The ‘take that’ aspects of the game are a considerable source of fun and interaction, and will also be useful in teaching children how to deal with disappointment at having their plans spoiled.

Overall, I would recommend this game for 5 – 7 year olds, as a fun experience which also reinforces skills in planning to reach a specific goals through pattern matching. As a gateway game, it could be useful to teach the skills that could lead youngsters on to commercial tile-laying games such as Tsuro and Carcassonne.

Tsuro is available on Amazon

Carcassonne is available on Amazon

Guess the Fence

for age 8+, 30mins, 2 players – A game which uses the ‘Battleships’ mechanic of hiding your actions from your opponent, which you then have to deduce. Whoever first guesses correctly the shapes and positions of the fences built by their opponent, wins.

Teaches: Geometry, patterns, data interpretation and planning, imagination and creativity, taking calculated risks, visual reasoning, problem solving, communication, motor skills.

In Guess the Fence, each player has a board, which is hidden from their opponent’s view by a screen. Much like battleships, each player must position a set number of specific shapes on their board, and then attempt to find (by informed guessing) all their opponents shapes first, to win.

The shapes used are one each of: large triangle, square, small triangle and rectangle

In this case, the shapes are constructed from three different lengths of plastic ‘fence’, consisting of a straight length and a ‘vertex’ (a small round hoop). The shapes are built by laying the fences on the board with the vertices corresponding to numbered circles on the board.

There are rules for construction e.g. only two fences can join at a vertex, a fence must start and end at a vertex etc.

Again, like Battleships, a player can mark whether their guess has ‘Hit’ or ‘Miss’ on a wipe clean marking sheet, and use the information gained from that to inform further guesses.

Battleships is available on Amazon

Unlike Battleships, the player can choose to make one of two kinds of guess on a turn. They may call out a numbered vertex. If it is a hit, they mark that in green. If a miss, in red. Or they may choose to guess a whole shape, by calling out all its vertices ‘Do you have a triangle at 3, 4 and 9?’. A hit here will give them 3 points and they can colour the shape in green on the marking board. A miss attracts a -1 score.

The jeopardy created by the possibility of losing points for a wrong shape guess introduces a interesting twist on the standard Battleship game, further emphasising the need to discover and correctly analyse information as well as simply scoring lucky hits.

This is a great game for developing visual reasoning, and data interpretation, including the pretty high order skill of extrapolating general principles from rules and applying them in differing situations. The geometry involved may be a little simple for the target age group but the overall experience provides opportunities for a pretty complex sessions of planning and problem solving, in order to play well..

At first glance, this game does not appear to have as much replayability as, say, Crafty Puggles.  But then I remember how playing Battleships with my dad kept me engrossed for years worth of summer camping holidays. It’s the intense competition that does it. And for the same reason it’s a game which parents can quite happily play with their kids too.

As the communication is deliberately kept to a minimum in a game of hidden information such as this, it is not an obviously ‘social’ game, but it does require clear and concise communication – in itself, a very important skill for youngsters.

Overall, I would recommend this game for parents and children who relish the opportunity to compete directly, and that it is very suitable for developing the spatial and visual reasoning skills of children between 7 and 10 years.

Lord of the Bins

for age 6+, 30mins, 2 – 6 players – Find hidden value in garbage. A game about sorting and recycling rubbish

Teaches about: Different kinds of waste, segregation and sorting, caring for the environment, sustainable cities and communities, responsible consumption.

Where my wider family comes from in the North of England, there’s a saying. “Where there’s muck, there’s brass”, meaning that there’s value in what usually gets thrown away. This is the premise behind this game. Junkland, where the game is set, is buried under a stinky heap of garbage, but the Lords of Junkland have realised there’s treasure to be found.

The major components of Lord of the Bins are cards; four different bin cards, eight Trump Trash Cards (yes, I know, I was thinking that too), and 60 trash cards representing different kinds of rubbish. Each trash card is numbered 1 to 9, where 1 is easy to compost or recycle, and 9 is difficult to do so.  Additionally, there are 25 yellow gems, 6 green gems (and a bag to keep them in),a key card token, a table listing all the different trash in the same four categories of the bin cards and a rather fetching raccoon hat.

Players hold hands dealt from a main deck of trash cards and trump trash cards shuffled together and each turn they take one more card from a ’marketplace’ of face-up trash cards. Depending on how many cards they choose to take and the current state of cards in the marketplace, they may also end up placing gems of marketplace cards, of picking up gems along with the cards they take.

Players then either play a single card (place it in its appropriate bin) or play a gem; an action which unlocks powerful strategic actions in the game, such as being able to play extra cards into bins.

Getting rid of cards is an important part of the game, as the winner is the player who has the lowest score when the game ends. A player’s score is the total of the numbers on all the cards still in hand.

The Raccoon hat comes into play as a punishment for being incorrect during a challenge. One player may challenge another if they feel that the first player has incorrectly placed garbage in a bin. The trash table is consulted to discover the truth of the matter, and whichever player was incorrect has to don the racoon hat and imitate a garbage eating animal.

Clearly, a player is likely to do better in this game, if they have a firm grasp on which garbage goes in which bin, and one of the main educational aims of this game is to get youngsters very familiar with these concepts. The raccoon hat provides an amusing way to inject some negative reinforcement into the game and discourage mistakes.

The rules of how cards can be placed into bins will also develop number sequencing skills, as players cannot place a card which does not ‘follow’ from one already placed.

This game has enough different combinations of components and therefore paths through the game, that it will remain replayable for some time, and I imagine that for the target age group of 6+, the raccoon hat itself will provide a sufficient to play this repeatedly even with, and maybe especially with, parents.

The strong narrative element of this game is also appealing to the target age group, with the winner being the victorious ‘Lord’ of Junkland, who has not only become rich, but done their bit to clean up the place they live.

The ‘challenge’ aspect of the game gives opportunities for considerable social interaction and will delight children, as there is always going to be someone who comes out of that looking silly in a raccoon hat.

Overall, as this game can be played by between 2 – 6players, I would recommend it both for home and the classroom for 6 – 10 y-o, where it could be used to support conversations around recycling and even housework responsibilities, and maybe for older end of the age group, around sustainability frameworks such as the SDGs.

Mystic Arts

for age 10+, 30mins, 3 – 4 players. A spell-casting game where players have to mix ingredients in the appropriate amounts and proportions to become the best wizard, or witch,  and win.

Teaches: Measurements, decimals, operations, conversion of units, mental maths, critical thinking, planning & strategy, decision making, focus

The theme of Mystic Arts will be very appealing to children drawn to Harry Potter and similar wizarding themed films and books. The aim of the game is to win by becoming the best potion maker. And as any witch or wizard knows, the key to great potions is accurate weights and measures.

The compact game is mostly card-based, and consists of three kinds. The first is ingredient cards – each ingredient also features a weight or measure (e.g. 1,800 ml of Honey Mead, or 2,300 mm of the Great Horn of the Dwarves). Spell cards endow actions that can affect the game, particularly to help you to win a potion by, for example manipulating a weight or measure. Potion cards come in two varieties, good potions and bad potions. Players must try to collect good potions while avoiding the bad ones.

When a potion is revealed, it will have a weight, a length and a volume. If it is good potion players will want to win it. They do so by selecting (in secret) one ingredient card from their hand which they hope will be CLOSEST to the same measurement unit on the potion card. If it is a bad potion, they will, conversely, choose an ingredient which they hope to be furthest away from the equivalent measurement on the potion card.

Players then reveal their choices, at the same time calling out the difference between their ingredient and the measurement on the potion card.

Spell cards can then be played to influence the outcome. For example a player who wants to win the potion may use a spell which exchanges their card with an opponent’s or changes the magnitude of their ingredient.

Play proceeds like this with the player who is the first to collect two good potions being the winner.

This game is very engaging – even for adults and older children. Due to limited access to very young children, my first playtest was with a 16 y-o, and we did choose to play it several times. The competitiveness and strategic aspects from the combination of using ingredients and spells to achieve your purpose, make it a balanced and fun experience.

The need to do conversion between different magnitudes of units (e.g. kilos and grams), in some cases, and to do rapid mental arithmetic, offer a good level of challenge to players, even those older than the target age. And the potential different combinations of cards that will come out in play, offering different experiences, mean that this game has considerable replayability.

Like all of the games reviewed here, (with the possible exception of Fracto), these games feel far more like commercial games that are intended for fun, rather than educational exercises which just happen to be games.

That is not meant to mean that they are not excellent educational tools – they are. It is rather a reflection of the skill of the designers to make great games, which children will want to play again and again, and which they will not see as ‘different’ from the other games that they play just for fun.

Playing Mystic Arts is a very sociable experience, because of the to-and-fro of trying to beat each other at winning (or losing) a potion, by using spell cards, if your initial ‘bid’ has not been successful. I would recommend for play both in the classroom, and at home, where it very well might become a family favourite.

Fracto

for age 8+, 15mins, 2 – 4 players. A game with 3 different variants, which focus on accuracy, speed and memory respectively. A card game of resource management in the jungle.

Teaches: Identifying fractions, operations with fractions, mental maths, visual reasoning, communication, strategy

Fracto offers three different card games in one compact box, containing 80 fraction cards, with the fractions shown in four different ways, as vulgar fractions (e.g. ⅔), in words (e.g. two thirds), as pictograms (e.g. one lion outlines and two full-colour lions, indicating ⅔) or pie chart or similar diagram.

In the first game WHOLE-IN-1, and in  DECK OF FORTUNE players win by discarding their whole hand. Cards can only be discarded in whole pairs (i.e both cards together add up to a whole 1). There are slight variations in the way the two games are played, so some players might find one more fun than the other.

MEMORY HERO is a variation on the whole pair theme, by incorporating a memory game too. Players have to make whole pairs but also have to remember cards that have been previously turned over in order to make more pairs than their opponents.

The game play of the suggested games is quite simple but appropriate for the 8+ target age, although they could be played with younger players too.

However the real value in these cards, I feel, is that they are a versatile set of components, which teachers, parents, and even children themselves could use to devise their own fraction based games, opening up possibilities, to not just become familiar with different ways of expressing fractions (which all these games do very well), but to explore higher order thinking skills of system design and critical thinking which games design requires.

Quality of Materials

The components of these games are visually appealing, and generally of high quality. The boards, in particular, are  and sturdy and durable. Tiles are likewise. Some playing pieces are made of cardboard, where they could have been more durable if made of wood, and the paper used in manuals can be a bit flimsy (but they are packaged in envelopes for protection). However, this is reflected in the very reasonable price points for these games, and on balance, it is better that the games are more widely accessible than that they are made of luxury materials.

The boxes are well designed. Everything has a place to be packed away neatly and there are smaller boxes to contain game pieces and components.

Many of the game guides also contain a QR code to access extremely well put together and informative video how to play guides

All in all, these games would be a high quality addition to your school or home educational game cupboard.

Check out reviews of other games, books and other game-related stuff.

The post Review – Luma World Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

Dear Data is available on Amazon

For many people data is a dry topic, and even those who are actually into the idea of the ‘Quantified Self’, often leave much of the measurement, and indeed the decisions about what should and can be measured, up to a third party. Wearable tech has no doubt opened up all sorts of possibilities for people to quantify aspects of their own lifestyles, performance and progress towards goals, but the approach in this book is decidedly both more DIY and more eclectic.

As someone who loves messing with spreadsheets, and twisting them to do things they probably (definitely) weren’t designed for, I’m always attracted by more or less anything to do with data – and indeed spreadsheets, but that’s a topic for another post entirely.

I own lots of other books about data visualisation, all of which I would heartily recommend. I am particularly drawn to the work of David McCandless, and my copies of ‘Information is Beautiful’ and ‘Knowledge is Beautiful’ are well-worn with constant use. However, this book holds special significance. It not only shows how ‘quantified self’ data  can be made extraordinarily beautiful in its visualisation, but it goes one step further. Far from data being dry ‘number crunching’, it shows how the love of data, and the systematic collection and thoughtful presentation of even the seemingly insignificant details of everyday life can be the basis for the building and maintaining of a relationship.

Information is Beautiful is available on Amazon

Every week Giorgia Lupi (from Italy but based in New York) and Stefanie Posavec (from Denver, but based in London), chose a theme relating to their daily lives. During the week, they would collect data on that theme, following the process of ‘Observe, Count, Explain/Draw, Post’. The ‘Post’ part of the process was decidedly old school – each week they sent a postcard to each other containing a visualisation of the data collected and analysed that week. The book contains reproductions of all of the postcards, along with some explanatory commentary – and it is gorgeous.

Each page consists of both sides of the postcard that was sent from one of them (so 104 postcards in total). The drawn visualation is on one side, the key and instructions for reading on the other.

So, what kind of data were they collecting? Quite often it was about the minutiae of life; food preference, the number and types of doors passed through, the results of smiling at strangers. In the grand scheme of things, these things could be seen as ‘inconsequential’, but that is most of the point of the data gathered in this book.

Knowledge is Beautiful is available on Amazon

They put it very well in the introduction to the book – where they also explain why the book is not a ‘Quantified Self’ (QS) project. Quite often the purpose of QS projects is to ‘improve’ us in some way – make us more active, or thinner, or more efficient. Usually they involve algorithms and tech and computation, designed for us. What Stefanie and Giorgia are trying to achieve on the other hand is to indicate how data can help us to ‘connect with ourselves and others at a deeper level’.

‘Everything can be mapped, counted and measured’

they say, and if anything can persuade you that you might want to do that, it would be this book. The postcards are beautiful works of art in their own right – but playfully treated, and not with any sense of taking things too seriously. After all, there are few things more ephemeral than a postcard.

Facts are Sacred is available on Amazon

It certainly inspired me, and I took up the challenge of measuring various aspects of my life armed with fineliners and Sharpies and a couple of apps – Blip Blip to remind me to note data at specific times, and Epicollect5 to create my own data entry tools. I think to maintain it for a year, I would probably need a partner to keep me colecting – which is probably why this project worked so well.

The drawings in the book are lovely, but knitting/crochet is my preferred artform, so at the back of my mind for some time have been two projects. One is some kind of knitted data project – a scarf of daily winter temperatures maybe!! The other is, of course, some kind of game – although the form that might take is much less clear.

Raw Data is available on Amazon

I daren’t even try starting to collect data on ‘ideas I have had, that have never come to anything, because of lack of time’.

I digress. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Even if you have no interest in data, it is worth owning simply for its beauty, and the inspiration you will get from seeing the imaginative ways in which the authors were able to so differently visualise similar datasets.

The post Review of Dear Data first appeared on Ludogogy.

Fail to Learn by Scott Provence is a book based on a syllogism. In fact, each of its three parts is based on one part of the syllogism: People learn the most from failure, People fail the most playing games and Therefore, games are the best way for people to learn.

Games-based learning (GBL) professionals and other interested parties make many claims for the efficacy of games in learning. For example, that they engender greater engagement, that they allow the creation of learning situations which would take much longer, or be more dangerous, in a non-game setting, or that play and learning are, in fact, the same thing. And there are many books in which you will find all these and more addressed in some detail.

An In-depth Exploration of Failure

One of this book’s greatest strengths, is that it focuses on just one aspect of play in learning, and thus, not only emphasises the importance of that aspect, but gives space and time to be really thorough in exploring it. While I, like many other GBL professionals have often cited ‘safe failure’ as a reason to use games in learning situations, I have never read something, which, in its depth, made me think about all of the implications of that in such detail.

This book is subtitled ‘A Manifesto for Training Gamification’, and the author goes on to explain his liking for the audacity and actionable nature of manifestos. There is much here that is actionable – and aspect of such books that I particularly like. Indeed, the entire third part of the book is dedicated to finding ways (many of them very quick and easy) to put into practice what you have learned about failure during the first two parts

An Audacious Manifesto

It is also true that many will find this book audacious, and for some educators, maybe too much so. As Scott notes throughout the book, we have been socialised to have a deep aversion to failure, and this is common in the field of learning and education as elsewhere. In this book, you will find compelling arguments as to why this is a problem we should, and indeed must, tackle, if we are to create learning as it should be, not only effective, but joyful.

While this subtitle implies a focus on workplace learning, the ideas within are universally applicable, from early education to adult learning. Creators of learning games often find that they have to justify why they are proposing learning techniques which many believe should be ‘just for children’. I hope that sceptics who read this book will find plenty of food for thought in the examples of research from learners of all ages.

People Learn the Most from Failure

In the first part of the book, People Learn the Most from Failure, the reader is invited to explore the current basis of many learning and education systems, based as they are on the ideas of Behaviourists such as B.F. Skinner. Although most teachers would dislike the idea that they treat the children in their care like pigeons in cages, or cats in electrified boxes, it is undeniable that we still ‘punish’ learners, of all ages, for failure, by making that failure ‘costly’ (if you fail the exam you must retake the whole course) and stigmatising the act of failure, as well as relying heavily on extrinsic motivators to incentivise people in all sorts of ways.

And yet, as Scott shows through references to many studies and through compelling anecdotes (the entire book is peppered with these, to great effect), those who are allowed to fail, benefit from that process by learning better – and the more they fail, the greater that beneficial effect becomes.
We often hear quotes from inventors and entrepreneurs about the wisdom of ‘failing fast and cheap’. This part of the book asks us to reflect on what failing fast and cheap might look in education.

People Fail the Most Playing Games

With the benefits of failure now well-established, we move to the second part of the book, People Fail the Most Playing Games. The first chapter of this section appears as an article in Ludogogy, so if you want to get a taste of this book you can do so there.

The section explains in detail what games are, and their relationship to failure, how they make it a low-cost activity, and the benefits of creating similar low-stakes failure opportunities in our learning experiences. Without ‘obstacles’, which bring with them the potential to stumble and fail, games are not games at all. When we apply this idea to learning, we discover, counterintuitively, that making learning more difficult, and thus more likely to cause failure, we facilitate learning rather than hindering it.

Therefore Games are the Best Way for People to Learn

The third part of the book, Therefore Games are the Best Way for People to Learn, draws together all that has come before, giving us actionable ways to implement constructive failure in our learning designs. But these are spread throughout the book too. Many chapters end with a pop quiz, which not only consolidate material covered in the preceding text, but, progressively, incorporate actionable failure features, providing practical examples of implementation and allowing us the experience of constructive failure in the learning of the book.

An example of the kind of simply actionable ‘hack’ that we could apply to learning designs, to utilise failure as a benefit, is to add ‘confidence’ scores to learner assessments. Learners answer a question and then simply give a score of 1 – 10 of how confident they are in their answer. This adds little design overhead, and, as it doesn’t need marking, adds nothing to the educator’s work after the fact. However, it is shown to increase correct recall of the material being tested, especially, again counterintuitively, if we are confident in an answer which is actually wrong.

Templates for You to Use

The final section of the book also provides a complete model incorporating the ideas in the book and templates and other resources to support your use of the model for your own learning designs are offered at Scott Provence’s site.

This review just scratches the surface of what you will learn by reading this book, and the inspiration you will take away for your own learning designs. Scott Provence has done a masterful job of exploring failure in its many forms and presenting us with simple applications, which in turn will inspire further exploration.

The aversion to both failure, and, it seems, fun, which characterises many of the education and learning experiences which many of us have borne in the past, and continue to have to bear, do not just make learning unpleasant, but they make it less likely to stick or benefit us longer term.
If you want to do your bit to make learning better, then embrace the fun and benefit of failure, and you could definitely do worse than to use this book as your guide in your exploration of Failing (in order) to Learn.

Honourable mention also has to go to Will Burrows, who did the illustrations for the book, which complement the text wonderfully.

Check out Scott Provence’s TEDx talk on Failing to Learn.

Fail to Learn is available on Amazon

(Ludogogy Affiliate policy: Ludogogy did receive a review copy of this product, but only publishes reviews of products that we would be willing to recommend and buy ourselves. If we don’t like something, we don’t write a review, ‘cos ain’t nobody got time for reading about something that’s no good)

The post Review – A Book About How We Learn From Failure first appeared on Ludogogy.

So, imagine my joy at discovering a game, or actually, a collection of games, which require no materials at all, beyond the complex computer situated between your ears, and has the subtitle ‘By Yourself’.

Games You Can Play In Your Head By Yourself is a collection of 10 games, gathered by Editors Sam Gorski and D.F. Lovett. They discovered six volumes of the original 14 volume set by J Theophrastus Bartholomew at a yard sale in 2015, and have selected these ten as being their favourites from those.

Top 10 Games You Can Play In Your Head, By Yourself: Second Edition available at Amazon 

Each game provides you with a series of stimuli for you to create a character and setting for your game, more accurately, to elaborate on the skeleton character and setting suggested for you.  For example, the first game, Adventure, casts you as an Indiana Jones/Lara Croft type (depending on your gender choice) who is about to embark on the exploration of a tomb in 1940s Egypt. The exact specification of the tomb is decided by you as part of the process of preparing yourself to play, as are your age, your nationality and politics, or even whether you are undead or not. You have a choice of disturbing childhood memories to draw upon as motivation/distraction during your adventure.

Once you have gone through the detailed preparation, you are ready to begin the game – which starts in the same way for each game – with the single word ‘GO’. You then sit quietly, on your own and play your chosen game, interacting with the characters you have imagined, walking the terrain described by maps you have drawn in your imagination, and seeing what becomes of you.

At the end of the book, you can read some of the experiences of those who have played these games before. You can read about Brad who accidentally assassinated the wrong person when playing ‘Murder Night’ and planted his gun on the Butler. You can recoil in horror at the idea that Chris nearly starved to death when playing ‘Dungeons’.

Playing with your Shadow Self

Before you start to play any of the games there is a practice exercise where you get to literally split yourself in two – your own self and your Shadow Self, and then play a simple game – a bit like the Tray Memory game, where your Shadow Self goes into a house and steals an object.  You then have to go back into the house and work out what it is they have stolen. My Shadow stole a Yard of Ale.  I have no idea why, and I also have no idea how they managed to hide it about their person as we passed in the entrance to the house.

Some of the games are also played with your Shadow Self. In fact, playing against your Shadow Self is considered the Expert version of the ‘Chess’ game.  The Shadow Self also provides something of a Red Thread running through the book, as after some of the games, you are asked to return to the house you imagined (Your Sanctuary) and hide something you have just brought back from your latest game. At the end, your treasures provide you with an opportunity to reflect and reminisce.

Games of Hard Fun

There is no denying that the core activity of this book is much, much more difficult to do than the simple instructions would imply, but perseverance pays off. The skills are much more akin to meditation, or guided daydreaming than ‘playing a game’, although I think that long-term practice of the games in this book might make the time spent alone living other lives in your head, feel more playful and less like a repeated failure to stay focused.

Some games designers reading this may well find inspiration to create similar games, but I think it would be difficult to design a form of these games that would be playable quickly, for most people.  I would suggest that the greatest value of this book, comes therefore, from its potential as a tool for exercising your own creativity and improving storytelling skills, which is essential for practitioners in our field.

This, if we were to apply the work of Nicole Lazzaro, is most definitely Hard Fun, both in the sense that the practice itself is difficult, but also in the sense that the things that you discover about yourself, through working and playing with your Shadow Self, can also be challenging.

A deeply strange, but beguiling book, highly recommended if you want to dip into the games to learn how to play creatively on your own, but also because there is an easter egg which gives the whole thing a really satisfying symmetry – and which will make you smile when you work it out.

Top 10 Games You Can Play In Your Head, By Yourself: Second Edition available at Amazon 

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The Transform Deck is designed to focus on inspiring creativity in the design of learning – and more specifically in the design of learner-centred active learning – because these cards are about turning your content into activities which will engage and involve.

First impressions of the physical components of the deck are very positive.  These cards, if used as designed (and because you will love using them), will get a lot of wear. The box they come in is robust and the cards themselves are of high-quality card stock.  Their large size makes them easier to pick up and handle (individually). The fact that you might might need to get a larger-handed member of your group to shuffle them (if you want to) is more than made up for by them being easy to read even across a larger table – ideal for collaborative design.

What’s in it?

The deck has 52 cards, consisting of five suits of nine cards each – which represent 45 different activities, six cards with suggested ‘plays’ and an introductory card, which briefly describes how to use the cards. These seven card’s worth of suggestions are well thought out, and will no doubt provide many hours of creative ideation, but they are not the only way these cards could be used. Indeed the introductory card itself invites you to ‘…go wild. There are no rules’. And that is the beauty of presenting the ideas contained within as a deck of cards.

Cards are an ideal medium for the ideation phase of any design process. Their portability allows you to classify, organise, position them relative to each other, and any number of other operations, which can turn a smaller number of ideas or processes into an almost infinite array of other ideas or applications through combination and context-setting.

The suits are:

• Assess – These cards relate to activities which can be used to assess a learner’s progress and/or would involve the learner themselves in assessing or evaluating something.
• Arrange – Activities involving ordering, sorting, placing things in context, creating visual representations such as maps and so on.
• Create – Activities which ask the learner to create physical and virtual artifacts, or take part in e.g. storytelling.
• Solve – Problem-based activities where learners must act to solve or ‘win’ in some way – includes competitive play.
• Apply – Activities which simulate or apply a learning process to ‘real-life’ scenarios.

There is inevitably some overlap between these suits, and for some of the cards you might argue they belong in a different suit, but ultimately that is largely unimportant. The idea of suits provides another classification which can be used to ‘play’ with the cards, and in that sense the category of any particular card is not an issue.

Anatomy of a Card

The cards are well laid out and easy to read, On the ‘face up side’ you can see the suit name and colour, the card number(more of that later), a title and two pieces of description – one of which describes the title in more detail and the other which gives a brief rationale for using that idea. At the bottom there a list of numbers. These refer to other cards which work well with this one – one of the suggested ways in which you can use the cards

On the reverse side, there is a brief example given of how the idea of the card might be applied to a specific kind of content.  For example, the ‘Matching’ card – card no 2, in the Assess suit, uses a brief example of how matching might be applied in an activity relating to Performance Management.

As well as the Examples – each card also contains three Tips, which, for example, suggest how the concept of the card could be practically implemented or how it could be extended or changed in some way.

Cards in Action

To give you a taste of the cards in action, I took three pieces of content I have been considering and applied three of the suggested ways to use the cards, to see what ideas it suggested.

A-Pick a card – with ‘Decision Making’ as content . Picking a card at random, got me card 28 – Share the Pieces.  This card description is ‘Learners each have piece needed to solve a puzzle – they must share to solve it’. The idea that suggested itself to me here was to give each member of a team a piece of information which is vital to feed into a decision that must be made. Each piece could then be revealed in turn with the group reflecting on what it adds (or what would be missing if it were not revealed).

C-Combinations. This uses the numbers at the bottom of a card. First take one card and then find one of the other cards suggested as a combination – you could of course also choose random cards.  My content was Induction and the two cards were 42 ‘Trial and Error’ and 30 ‘Points and Achievements’.  This suggested a ‘Treasure Hunt’ with learners given simple scenarios of finding a resource, or seeking help with something, and having to approach existing staff (either facilitators with a simple script, or cards with info they can turn over to discover if they have approached the right person). They get minus points for ‘failing’ and positive points for ‘succeeding’, receive clues on where to go next , and can ‘redo’ until they successfully navigate the scenarios.

F-Spreads The Spreads ‘How-to’ invites the learning designer to lay out cards in an arrangement (like a Tarot spread), relating to, e.g. a learning theory. I decided to use Kolb’s Learning Cycle (Do, Reflect, Learn, Test) and apply this to Sustainability Leadership content. I picked cards at random (because I like synchronicity).  This is what I got

• Do – Card 1 ‘Pros and Cons’ (Learners think about and list the pros and cons of various options)
• Reflect – Card 19 ‘Inspiring Prompts’ (Learners freewheel ideas from a selected group of relevant prompts)
• Learn – Card 36 ‘Quest’ (Learners pursue a set quest, using the Internet or other resource)
• Test – ‘Pre-mortem’ (Learners imagine that something has gone wrong, and review why)

In my session idea, therefore, learners could be  presented with an option for sustainability action within their organisation and spend some time listing the pros and cons for this particular action, before reflecting on what they have discovered using real-life examples of other companies’ sustainability actions as a lens. It was more difficult to see how the ‘Learn’ stage and the ‘Quest’ card might work together so I swapped it with the ‘Pre-mortem’ card, to get the learners to draw conclusions from the ‘Cons’ they have already identified and imagine what those would look like in reality if they were allowed to play out in the organisation. Finally, their quest would be to create a new idea for a sustainability action – they can use the Internet to research what might be feasible, which would address those Cons, and that idea would then be put through that same cycle.

The Transform Deck will not design your session for you.  It makes no claims that it will. This is written quite plainly on the introductory card.  What it will do, is inspire you, probably for many years to come to create compelling and engaging activities for your learners.  I did not spend hours coming up with the ideas above. In total, I spent about 20 minutes playing with the cards, and obviously, if I really wanted to develop these ideas it would have taken some time to do that, but as a tool for coming up with the ideas in the first place, this tool is great. Alongside the learning ideas themselves, I also found myself thinking of numerous other ways that I might use the cards – different ‘games’ to play with the cards, alternative ‘spreads’, and ways in which individual cards might be used slightly differently e.g. card 7 ‘Amplify/Reduce’ made me think of similar ‘opposites’ ‘Earlier/Later’, ‘Hidden/Revealed’ etc.  You will not run out of ideas with this deck by your side.

Where to get it

There are three options for purchasing the Transform Deck.  You can purchase the Deck alone, purchase the Transform Toolkit – which contains the Deck, a set of Digital Mini card which you could for example use in Miro or similar if you wanted to collaborate online, and membership of the Transform Toolkit forum, where you can access hints and tips and discuss how you are using the deck with other members.

Terry’s innovative learning design tool, The Transform Deck is available to buy from his shop.

(Ludogogy Affiliate policy: Ludogogy did receive a review copy of this product, but only publishes reviews of products that we would be willing to recommend and buy ourselves. If we don’t like something, we don’t write a review, ‘cos ain’t nobody got time for reading about something that’s no good)

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This book, ‘Gameful Habits’ is number seven in the series entitled ‘Gameful Life’, and focuses, as you might expect, on the acquisition, and maintenance of beneficial habits.

Although many of you reading this, because you are reading it in Ludogogy, probably have some, or a lot, of experience in games design, for others it might feel a bit daunting that Victoria’s idea is to turn them into designers of games in order to achieve whatever it is that they want. So it is important to note that she stresses, right at the start of the book, that practising self-gamification will allow you to achieve flow and fun (and get stuff done) without having to study games design, or psychology, in detail.

Victoria also mentions that she, like many of us, over the last year or two, has been inspired by James Clear’s ‘Atomic Habits’.  So, what does her book have to offer us that this very popular work does not?

I believe it is a useful complement to Clear’s work, and those with an interest in using their capacity to form habits to better their lives, could benefit from having both of these books in their ‘to read’ pile.  Clear’s book is great for the ‘why’ of habits – as well as being very practical. Victoria’s book is completely practical, but has the added advantage of being about the fun, happiness and flow that can be achieved when you gamify yourself and your habits.

While there are obviously many, many different habits that people might want to apply this approach to, in this book, Victoria chooses to describe her experience with just one – applying self-gamification to the desired habit of getting enough sleep. I personally liked this way of approaching the topic. It enables the reader to really get to the heart of the methods, without having to process multiple different examples of application.

And don’t worry if you struggle with working out how you might adapt the ‘Super Sleeper Game’ to drinking enough water, your exercise routine or anything else. Chapter 11 is entitled ‘Extrapolating Super Sleeper to other Super Habit Games’ and gives you plenty of raw material for designing your own games, including ideas for scoring and rewarding oneself.

In a time when many of our behaviours are gamified by those who may want us to behave or act in ways beneficial to them – from purchasing habits, to social (media) interaction and even how we perform work tasks, Victoria’s approach represents a more benign side to gamification, showing how it can be applied with kindness, and most importantly with autonomy, because with self-gamification, you are both the player and designer of your own life-games.

If you are interested in finding out more about Victoria’s approach, you can visit her site at https://www.victoriaichizlibartels.com/ or of course, you can read the articles which she has contributed to Ludogogy at https://www.ludogogy.co.uk/author/victoriaib/

Gameful Habits: How to Turn Your Daily Practices into Fun Games is available on Amazon

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Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design is available on Amazon

I’m not sure whether I would have foregone that piece of work, if this book by Geoff Engelstein and Isaac Shalev had existed back then, because it was extremely instructive, but I would definitely have used the book as a starting point for my exploration of game mechanics.

Simply put, this book is an invaluable resource for any game designer, and I have found myself dipping into almost daily since I got it. Like the best sourcebooks it is easy to find what you require. The mechanics are categorised into chapters, by the purpose they serve inside a game and each mechanism is referenced by an id which indicates its category and order within the chapter – which I have found useful as a shortcut to reference them within game design documentation.

The impossibility of listing all game mechanics

While, as any game designer knows, there is often ambiguity about what category any specific mechanism should fit into, I think the authors have done an excellent job both in categorising a mechanic by its primary effect or purpose and in selecting the categories they will include in the book.  There are 13 chapters each with between 10 and 20ish mechanics, ranging from the very broad  – Chapter One is entitled ‘Game Structure’ and the very specific – Chapter 10 deals with ‘Movement’.

So, this is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all mechanics. This, in any case, would be an impossible task. Take for example STR-10 (Game Structure mechanic 10) – Legacy Games. A few years ago this term had not been coined. New mechanics are being discovered or invented all the time. In the introduction to the book the authors state where the lines have been drawn. First and most obviously, the title suggests that we are looking at the mechanics of tabletop games, but even within that, they state that e.g. wargaming, miniatures gaming and classic and collectible card games are only referenced in passing, and that whole categories such as narrative, dexterity and pantomime are equally lightly touched upon.  Maybe these will form the basis of a further book, or furnish an opportunity for other authors to produce a similarly comprehensive work.

My very favourite thing about this book, are the discussions of each mechanic. Each mechanic is illustrated with a line graphic which visualises its effect neatly, a short description which explains the effect of the mechanic, and then the discussion, which demonstrates the mechanic in action in real games, so you can find out, for example, how Loans (ECO-07) work in Railway Tycoon or Wealth of Nations, or how Push-Your-Luck operates in Can’t Stop or Mystic Vale.  Each mechanic section ends with a list of sample games which demonstrate the use of the specific mechanic.

Useful index for game design

At the rear of the book is the game index. This allows you to look up a game and see which mechanics it features. For example, when looking up Chess you will find ARC-06 – Force Projection, ECO-11 – Upgrades, MOV-01 – Tessellation, MOV-03 – Pattern Movement, RES-11 – Static Capture and STR-01 – Competitive Games.

Eric Zimmermann, who wrote the foreword for the book, mentions some points that are worth raising here too.  While some may feel that the 184 mechanisms listed in the book are just a small fraction of those that exist, the categories that are included are treated with depth, for example there are now fewer than 16 different Auction mechanics – which brings me to one final point.

While these are game mechanics, the ideas they represent have application outside of games too -questions of fairness, communication and determining winners in a given situation amongst other things are illuminated by study of these games.

And far from ruining a thing by examining it too closely, reading this book can enrich your play too, even if you have no intention of ever designing a game yourself. Next time you play, your appreciation of a game will be enhanced by a greater understanding of how a mechanic is operating, and the care and thought that a designer has applied to make your experience just so.

Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design is available on Amazon

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This small book by Vasilis Gkogkidis, might not contain much that is new to the average reader of Ludogogy, who is already (I am assuming) a convert to games-based learning, and has perspectives on both learning and games. However, this is not to say that it would not be useful to them.  Indeed, its very brevity, makes it ideally suited to the latter part of the conversations I have been having. If you wanted to be able to explain the pedagogical value of games and gamification to someone who already has a grounding in learning, without asking them to dive into the findings of academic studies for themselves, and in a form that allow them to grasp the fundamentals quickly and clearly, then this book would work extremely well.

The formats of the chapters themselves are also ideal in this regard.  Each chapter (and indeed sections within chapters) deals with a specific topic and is followed by a list of exercises to follow to consolidate the points made, games to play which illustrate game mechanics or a specific kind of play experience, and ‘Deep Dive’ references, for those readers whose interest has been piqued, and who want to explore further.

As I have also been reading Geoff Engelstein’s ‘Building Blocks of Tabletop Games Design’, the chapter on Games Mechanisms looks very slim. But Gkogkidis’ intention is not to be exhaustive, and I think the choice of mechanisms (or rather categories of mechanisms) he has made, as an introduction to this concept for educators, is just right. The importance of Feedback and Meaningful Choices cannot be overemphasised in a learning setting, and mechanics which introduce timing and randomness are important for the management of learning and to level the playing field in multi-ability settings.

A whole chapter is dedicated to the important subject of developing narrative in learning games, along with copious examples of narrative frameworks and a choice of games which will give a good contrast between play where the narrative is merely a device to support gameplay and that where it is the central pillar of the play experience.

Gkogkidis does not neglect the less ‘fun’ aspects of the games design process, prototyping and playtesting, either, with clear and succinct instructions on how to do both of these.

At the end of the book there are case studies of specific learning games, and I was delighted to see that one of the featured games was ‘Project Ninjas’, by a previous Ludogogy contributor, Tania Vercoelen. Part of the chapter is in the form of an interview with Tania, which answers many of the questions which an organisational learning professional considering using games for the first time might need answered.  One of the other games featured in this section (there are four) is ‘I Lost my Mummy’, and I particularly like that Vgogkidis has included games for both adult learning and for children in this section, without finding it necessary to explicitly make the point that GBL is suitable for both these constituencies.

The conclusion to the book contains the very wise advice to start small (with games design) and gradually build, based on iteration and feedback, and a list of references, which is pleasingly representative of the main concepts (and the main thinkers) which a fledgling learning games designer will need to start them on their way.

As a text for the budding learning games designer, (or learning game sceptic) in your life, this book would make an excellent primer, with plenty of hands-on practice to get them started and enough follow-on reading to help them continue that journey, once they have begun.

‘Designing Games and Gamification for Learning’ can be purchased from Bookboon.

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Complexity in Creating Teams

The book is divided into three parts, logically taking us through the process of first, creating teams who will be equipped to deal with complexity, then identifying, assessing and adapting to complexity, and finally the practice of co-creation as a strategy to address complexity in a project, delivery initiative and in the whole organisation.

Although this book, as I mentioned, is aimed at software development teams, it has a number of applications for the reader of Ludogogy – learning professionals, games-based or otherwise, and designers of games or other playful experiences.

First, as a topic area. Learning Professionals working with organisations or with topics which involve complexity; climate change, racism and other systemic wicked problems will find models in here that are applicable way beyond the Agile team. For example, the section on Estimating Complexity by Liz Keogh would be an excellent addition to any learning session inviting learners to reflect carefully on the complexity of some aspect of organisational life – a change initiative or a project plan, for example.

Models and Practice in Complexity

Second, the book presents models and practices for working in design and development teams outside the software development arena, for example, learning and tabletop games design. Section 1 of the book is applicable to almost any team that is expecting to deal with some form of complexity – which describes most teams. The practices in this part of the catalogue address approaches to get the best out of the tendency of teams to self-organise (if not hindered from doing so). For example, Joseph Pelrine’s ‘Basic Model’ describes how the four prerequisites of a self-organising human system – which encompasses the team, its surrounding environment and those form outside who nevertheless have to interact with the team.

These prerequisites are: Critical Mass – the team must of a certain minimum size before emergent behaviour occurs; Diversity and Dissent – a diverse team avoids the evils of Groupthink and blindspots, an Environment large enough to work comfortably but small enough that people will necessarily interact; and Letting People Do It – Management get out of the way and let the team get on with it.

Complexity Control Knobs

Thirdly, for those of us actively involved in games design, this book provides excellent source material for game mechanisms and aesthetics. In the first part of the book, many of the practices are presented with accompanying ‘Control knobs’. These were part of what Pelrine originally offered as the ‘control knob’ analogy provides a way to think about deliberate design of the practices. For example, in the model above, the knobs which can be turned to find the optimum settings for a team are Team Size, Team Boundaries – who is in and who is out, and Roles. Minudel expands the use of the ‘knobs’ to the other, non-Pelrine, models in part one.

These even look like the kinds of controls one might get in a video game, and suggest, at least to me the way in which these models and practices could be implemented in scenario-based simulations and games which would allow players to test the efficacy of different approaches in a business or team setting.

Early in the book, you find a suggestion on how to approach decisions in a self-organising system, which has relevance to what we do when we design games, because what is a group of people playing a game if not a self-organising system? At the beginning of Part 3 there is a description of co-creation – also an important dynamic in collaborative games.

A Simple Format for Presenting Complexity

There is a standard format to the way that each of the practices is presented in the book. There is an overview which outlines in brief what the model or practice does. Then its Purpose is described, followed by an explanation of its Relation to Complexity (Theory). A fuller description of the practice/model follows, including diagrams and ‘control knobs’ (if applicable). Finally there is a section entitled ‘Practical Tips and Stories’ which includes ‘What now’ , ‘When’, How to’ and ‘What next’ tips, which give practical examples of the model in use, and stories which illustrate some or all of these in more detail.

The book also provide links to Complexity resources online and elsewhere and contains detailed biographies of all the people whose models appear in the book, so it is an excellent starting point for learning more about Complexity. But this book is most definitely focused in practice, so while the theory is there to a certain extent, the most valuable thing to be taken from reading this book is that you can immediately apply what you read.

Living Complexity is available at https://leanpub.com/livingcomplexity/ and with a discount voucher worth $6 at https://leanpub.com/livingcomplexity/c/DtFB1ESGuJn4

The post Review – Living Complexity by Luca Minudel first appeared on Ludogogy.

So it’s wonderful to come across a book that embodies those principles and asks: how can we design for play within our structures of work and study? Where and how can playful experiences be better experiences? Specifically, the book focuses on three areas where play can help: in design, in learning, and in innovation. So, this book is relevant to everyone from town planners to lecturers to product designers.

Research, Frameworks and Practical Examples

It’s bookended with an introduction and epilogue that help round out the principles (and give a great analogy of play design as a melting pot of various elements). But aside from these, the book is a collection of pieces from different authors, each focused on one perspective for play design. The common themes among them are research, frameworks, and practical examples. Most are based on solid research, well-organised. The frameworks I found most interesting: often-graphical representations of key concepts, ready to use. And the practical case studies and examples of application help bring it all to life.

The compilation nature is the thing I liked most and least about the book. The differing perspectives allow a picture to emerge that’s nuanced and complex, and there isn’t the sense that one agenda is being pushed: it’s a complex area with few points of universal agreement, and this reflects that. But the other side of this coin is that the differing authors mean there’s less coherence to this as a book than many, and when the focus for one author is less relevant or less well-written, your interest can wane.

A Taste of the Book

But that’s okay; this can be seen as a book to jump around in rather than read cover to cover, and if you focus on the chapters most relevant to you, there is some fantastic content. Some of my favourites include:

• Jesper Falke Legaard’s chapter on designing meaningful play experiences, which provides a play blueprint that really helps to pull apart, examine and improve any play design
• Jess Rahbeck’s chapter on playful tension, which unites ideas of tensions and paradoxes across theories from Piaget’s to Csikszentmihalyi’s, many of which I’d not come across, and gives some very practical scales against which to consider your own play designs
• Tilde Bekker, Ben Schouten and Landa Valk’s chapter on the lenses of play card tool, which resembles Jesse Schell’s game design lenses, but with a play rather than game design focus

Anybody who designs any kind of experience, consultation or process in which they want to enhance a sense of play and reap the rewards should find this a useful and practical guide. Some of it will almost certainly speak to you more than other parts, but as that will probably differ from reader to reader, that’s fine: a great approach with this book would be read and run with the parts that apply to your practice most.

Framing Play Design: A hands-on guide for designers, learners and Innovators is available on Amazon

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