OBJECTIVE OF BLANK SLATE: To be the first to earn 25 points and win the game.
NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 3 to 8 Players
COMPONENTS: 8 colour-coded cute whiteboards, 8 dry erase markers, a score board, a deck of 250 double-sided word cue cards in a holder and a rule book.
TYPE OF GAME: Party/Family Board Game
AUDIENCE: Ages 8 and Up
OVERVIEW OF BLANK SLATE
This is such a fun, fun game where everyone secretly writes a word to complete a word cue card with the hopes of matching with just one other player to earn the most points.
SETUP
Place the deck of cards on the table. Give everyone a whiteboard and let them write their names on the scoreboard in the spaces matching the colours of their white boards.
GAMEPLAY
The players randomly chose who picks up the first cue word card from the deck. That player calls out the word written on it to everybody’s hearing, then places the card in the center of the table or play space face-up.
Everyone scrambles to write a word that they think would best fit or complete the word on the card and then drops their whiteboard face down without letting out a hint as to what was written. Only the complimentary word is written.
When everyone is done writing (sometimes a timer is introduced to heat things up), all players reveal their answers at the same time by flipping over their boards. Alternatively, players can reveal their answers one after the other.
The aim is to try to match with at least one person among the other players. (Great minds think alike they say).
Once points have been awarded the next player becomes the selector. The game continues anti-clockwise except otherwise stated until everyone has had a turn at being the selector.
Examples
An example of gameplay would be if in a 5 player game, the Selector (one of the players) chooses a card that has the word Speed with a blank line drawn after the word like this SPEED———–, player A can choose to write limit, B and C, lane and player D would write boat and player E breaker. All five words are valid options but only players B and C would earn three points each as they both wrote matching words. Players A, D and E earn no points for their words.
Another example would be where the Selector chooses a card bearing ICE—————, players A, B, and C all write cream while D and E both write pack. Players A, B, and C would all earn one point each while D and E would earn 3 points each and record this on the score card against their names
This is a fun game to introduce to schools when teaching prefixes or suffixes (as the words to complete the cue words can be either before or after it) and also compound words or two-word phrases.
SCORING
For every pair of matching words, the players earn 3 points each. Where more than 2 players have matching words, each player earns 1 point each. Players with unmatched words earn no points at all.
END OF GAME
The game ends once a player gets to 25 points.
