board games

[Brady Yoon]

Ok, these end of the year projects are just killing me. Tests I'm ok with, but I can't manage my time correctly and ge all the materials in one place and stuff like that.

My biology teacher assigned a project on the human body; I have to do either the cardiovascular system or the respiratory system (it would be preferrable if the two could be linked together)

Do you guys have any ideas for the project? My current idea is a pretty uncreative one where the players must go through the bloodstream and heart and whoever reaches the end wins. I don't know what to call it though.

So basically, either a new idea or a name and expansion of my current game would help greatly.

Thanks. :)

[farmerjumperdon]

You could spice it up with penalties that would make it more real. Back X number of spaces for smoking, sharing needles, binge drinking, a steady diet of burgers and Doritos, etc. You probably can't get too macabre with it being a school project.

Fun spaces on a board might be:

<> Trip to LA requires purchase of gas-mask, pay Air Bank $130.
<> Bad career choice lands you in petroleum refinery, go back to school (lose a turn and cough up $20K).
<> You've successfully quit smoking. Collect $4 every turn the rest of the game and add 15 years to your life expectancy.

You could provide multiple ways of losing, running out of money, running out of air, etc. The winner at the end might be the person who attained the highest life expectancy based on the events throughout the game. Each player has a running life expectancy score that goes up and down with the events of their life. You could incorporate a spinner to reflect that some stuff is a crapshoot. If someone landed on a Started Smoking space, they then spin a wheel that has 1 spot for dying relatively quickly of cancer in your 60's, and 5 or 6 spots for suffering from emphysema for a couple decades before you die in your late 70's. This could double as a health education thing for younguns.

[farmerjumperdon]

BTW, if you are into board games, check out itsyourturn.com

It's chock full of ladder competitions, tournaments, etc.; or you can just play ad hoc games with friends and anybody who joins and posts invites.

Good fun.

[PatKelley]

Just keep it to what blood does- a there-and-back again with each player having four blood cells- Start out with a CO2 (black poker chip), and pick up an oxygen (white poker chip) from the lungs and return to the starting tissue with it. First to get two O2's back to the cell wins... all paths are one-way.

Random cards and multiple forks could include -
Carbon Monoxide: lose any O2 the cell is carrying. Cell must continue in the direction of the board.
Clot - cell is caught in blood clot and removed from the game.
Vessel blockage: lose a turn.
High blood pressure: Cell must move x number of spaces, unable to stop for O2 or CO2.

[Enzp]

Start with the old Rube Goldberg game of Mouse Trap. Then redo all the parts as cartoon representations of the circulatory system. The payoff could be when you trip it at the end, it delivers a stent to an artery near the heart.

The old game Careers came to mind. It has a outer series of boxes as in Monopoly, and then ther are several loops into the interior - each is a career path. I envision the game overall as "Bodies" and each loop is a system: cardio, respiratory, digestive, etc. Each little loop has maybe 10-12 steps. Several students could each contribute one system to it. They still make careers. I don't know about Mouse Trap.