COVID-19 – safety hints:

With the shifting waves of the pandemic, there is no way to tell whether you will be able to sit 30 students in a classroom for the game, on the day you have planned for, or whether certain restrictions will have been placed on how teaching can take place. In the following post, I have tried to show the different ways you can create a safer playing area for Battle for the Presidency, so you can decide realistically whether it is possible and safe to play the game with your class.

Battle for the Presidency is designed to be played by up to 30 students divided into smaller groups .You can keep the maximum group size to five. If you need groups that are smaller than five students, you will have to accept a lower total number of players.

Playing pieces – cards and boards:

The game is intended as a print, cut, and play game. So in extreme situations, you can instruct a member of each of the groups to print their part of the playing pieces and cut them out themselves.

However, if you as a teacher meet the students in person anyway, there is no reason you should not print and handle the material yourself and hand it out to the students. I recommend sorting everything in advance and placing it in an envelope or plastic folder for each table, so students don’t handle each other’s material.

The playing area:

The most extreme and safest course of action would be to have the players for each region placed in their own group room, and HQs split up in one room each. It is definitely possible to conduct all communications digitally and not actually move candidates to any states during the game.

Note, however, that there will be long quiet spells in the regional offices, if they cannot see the activities of their neighbours and the HQ from a distance, but are left in isolation between their actions. Also, candidates still have to visit states in the terms of the game – even if they do not move physically, so you will have to make it very clear to everybody what the candidates are doing as a game action. So this solution is possible, but not ideal.

The optimal way for the game experience is simply to use a significantly larger room than you usually would. If you follow the layout of this chart, you can optimize the distance between student groups at all times. By using visitor chairs, it is still clear, when someone visits a state or a region, and you have a way of ensuring their distance from the other group, which standing at a distance does not ensure to the same degree.

You can download a PDF file showing set-up here:

Play safely, 

Malik

PS. Remember you can buy the game at Teachers Pay Teachers.