Our really simple catapulting Mayfly game was really fun to play and quite hard! We used a lego catapult and little bits of scrunched up tissue paper for the mayflies. Ru and i only managed to get one mayfly in the fish’s mouth!
When we came up with the idea of feeding mayflies to a big hungry fish, we were thinking of games like tiddlywinks or the hopping frog game. These are dynamic games with no strategy apart from trying to get as many counters into a pot or on a target; very funny to play and good for coordination!
We had already made a rough paper fish mouth here
So now we had to work out how to make the mayfly counters (or bits of scrunched up tissue paper!) fly into the fish’s mouth! First Ru thought of using a spoon balanced on a block, but then as Ru is a huge Lego fan he pretty quickly went and built a Lego catapult, which worked really well!
We made a new fish and a board from a folded piece of coloured corrugated card. We stuck on torn bits of tissue paper for the water (you can see we couldn’t wait for the glue to dry before we started playing!).
If you were going to develop a board game like this with elements of movement and aim, what would your storyline be? Would you try to catapult the mayfly over the fishes mouth onto a safe target? Or would your hoverfly be trying to land in as many flowers as possible to pick up pollen?
P.S. Look at these brilliant catapult ideas made from things you might find around the house! We will definitely be trying some of them for our game!