Classrooms & libraries
Games that fit a school day
Indoor recess, a reading-group rotation, a library games hour, the last twenty minutes of a Friday. Here are the numbers you need to work out whether ours fit: play times, how many children one copy seats, and what happens when a piece goes missing.
Play time
Does it fit the block?
Play times come from her boxes and her own published specs. Every one of them is short enough to set up, play and pack away inside a single period, and short enough to run twice if the first round goes well.
Keeper Chaos
- Play time
- Seats
- Ages
- 15–20 min
- 2–5
- 5+
No reading required. The board, the spinner and the cards are pictures and colors, so a child who can’t read yet plays without help.
Cluck, Cluck, Moose!
- Play time
- Seats
- Ages
- 5–10 min
- 1–4
- 4–99
Pre-school to middle school. It’s a card game with nothing to set up, so it travels to a carpet, a hallway or a bus.
DisArmory
- Play time
- Seats
- Ages
- 15–30 min
- 2–4
- 12–99
Not shipping yet. DisArmory is on preorder and the ship date hasn’t been announced. Don’t plan a term around it.
Quick to learn. No rulebook slog: you’re playing within a few minutes of opening the box, which matters more in a classroom than anywhere else.
One claim about learning, and it is hers. The back of the Keeper Chaos box calls it “an introduction to critical thinking for younger players.” That is the whole of what the packaging says, and we have not added to it.
Class sets
How many copies for a room?
One copy seats the number printed on its box, so a room of thirty needs six copies of a five-player game for everyone to be playing at once. That’s the whole calculation, done below for the usual sizes.
| Children | Keeper Chaosseats 5 | Cluck, Cluck, Moose!seats 4 | DisArmoryseats 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | 3 copies | 3 copies | 3 copies |
| 20 | 4 copies | 5 copies | 5 copies |
| 24 | 5 copies | 6 copies | 6 copies |
| 30 | 6 copies | 8 copies | 8 copies |
Rounded up, with no allowance for children pairing up on one seat; plenty of rooms run smaller sets and rotate groups through instead.
Rules & spares
Rules, and what to do about lost pieces
Read the rules before you buy
The full Keeper Chaos instructions are on the site, along with the board and every piece in the box, so you can see exactly what a group would be doing before spending anything.
A spinner that can’t go missing
Classroom pieces disappear. The online spinner and paw cards stand in for the physical ones on any screen or whiteboard, free and with nothing to install. If a piece is gone for good, we’ll replace it.
Animals worth talking about
Keeper Chaos is set in a zoo, and every animal on the board has a facts page, a natural stop for a group that finishes early and wants to know whether a red panda is really a panda.
Playing without sight of the screen
The online spinner works from a keyboard and announces its result aloud to a screen reader. We keep a plain list of what works and what doesn’t yet, so nobody finds out the hard way.