A Paper Gameboard Tweak

/

Based on the emails i got, people seemed to enjoy Quinta idea I posted last month, The Paper Gameboard.

I really like your concept for creating the paper gameboard for the Quinta force. You're right, it definitely smooths out some of the rough points of the force. I know there are people who use Quinta all the time, but something about just using the counting procedure to make a selection between 5 objects always seemed a little contrived to me. But this idea gives it motivation and makes the procedure more engaging.

That was the start of an email from reader Ryan M. He then went on to offer a tweak to the procedure that eliminates the need for the Paul Harris Pointer Anomaly Principle… or whatever it’s called.

What Ryan discovered (maybe discovered is the wrong word, maybe this is obvious to people, but I hadn’t thought of it) is that an arrow is naturally equivocal.

An arrow can be seen as pointing to the starting point OR pointing in the direction the game piece should move. Both make perfect sense.

There are a couple of ways you could do this.

Verbally

This was my first thought, based on what Ryan suggested in his email.

I would introduce the arrow and the balled up piece of paper.

“The arrow will be used as a spinner, to determine which direction we start moving from. The ball is going to be a 50-sided die. But you’ll use your imagination to determine what actual number it rolls.”

That first sentence seems to make sense at this point, although if you really examine it, you’ll see it’s not exactly clear. But nobody will ever notice that because you’re immediately telling them this wadded up paper ball is 50-sided die. That’s more interesting than the previous sentence.

After “rolling the die,” you can have them spin the arrow freely (I would still probably have them do this face-down) and they can turn it over however they want.

You now say one of the following two things:

  1. Okay, so we’ll move in that direction. And the number of moves was what again?

    or

  2. Okay, so we’ll start from that side. And the number of moves was what again?

Both sentences make sense with what you said originally about the purpose of the arrow.

Non-Verbally

Here’s another option that came to my mind.

Write this on the paper:

This image can be interpreted two ways.

  1. We start on the left and move to the right.

    or

  2. We start on the right.

In this case, I wouldn’t show them the arrow or mention its purpose. I’d draw it on the paper and have it placed face-down on the table. Have them roll the “die” and name the number. Then have them rotate the arrow (that they still don’t know is an arrow) face down on the table and turn over the piece of paper so it faces either direction. As they turn the paper, I’d tell them that “this is like a spinner on a gameboard,” then when they turn it over I’d cement in what it means.

“So it looks like we’re going to start on this side, and move this direction.”

or

“So we’re going to start on this end.”

I haven’t done it yet, but it feels pretty much unimpeachably fair to me.

Thanks to Ryan for writing in and letting me share the idea with you guys.