Simon says

The hardest job in the game is being the caller

Simon says is simple to play and surprisingly hard to run. The caller has to keep inventing commands, keep the rhythm going, and remember to leave the prefix off often enough to catch anybody. Do it for five minutes and the commands start repeating; do it for ten and everybody can hear the pause before the catch coming.

Handing the calling to the screen fixes all three at once. The commands come out of a set of sixty or more, the prefix appears at a rate you chose rather than one you can feel yourself falling into, and the adult who was calling can go back to watching the room, which is where the game is actually refereed.

Warm-ups, brain breaks and wet play

The four sets are written for four different jobs. Classroom PE is stretches, marching, balance and star jumps, with nothing that needs space or equipment. Brain break is the two-minute reset: count backwards, name three animals, one deep breath. The younger children set is the classic game, and the silly set is for the last ten minutes of a wet lunchtime.

Put it on the board in full screen and it reads from the back of a room. If you want it to run without anybody touching it, turn on calling by itself and set the seconds between calls: three is frantic, five is a game, eight gives a class of thirty time to get it wrong properly.

Running it for a big group

With thirty players, being out for the rest of the game means half the room is watching by the third minute. Two house rules fix it. Sit down when you are caught and rejoin at the next Simon says, so nobody is out for more than a few seconds. Or keep a count of catches instead of knocking anybody out, and the winner is whoever has the fewest at the end.

If you are keeping a count, the scoreboard is the page beside this one, and the countdown timer gives the round a hard end so the game finishes while it is still fun. For the same idea with prompts rather than commands, the jar of questions and the pictionary generator run the same way.

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