De Bello Grammatico™
The word play card game.
De Bello Grammatico™ is a word play card game built to reinforce Latin vocabulary and grammar in an engaging and entertaining way. The game uses tried and true educational concepts and brings them together to make an interesting and fun learning experience.
Are you a Latin teacher looking for an educational way to keep your students occupied without losing their attention? Are you a Latin student who wants a fun way to study with friends? Try the game both teachers and students love.
De Bello Grammatico™ can be played in the span of a normal class period, as a supplement to a normal Latin curriculum.
But how does it work? Each round, one student plays a Sentence Card (usually an ancient quote), for which other students suggest alterations by playing a Word Card which will replace a word of the same part of speech. When all of the students have played a card, the Praetor (the student who played the Sentence Card) chooses which substitution suits the sentence best. For example, for the Ciceronian quote 'Fortuna est caeca', students might suggest cards like 'Julius Caesar' or 'Celer', altering the sentence to 'Julius Caesar is blind' or 'Fortune is swift'. The idea is that students can have fun mutating ancient quotes into inane, ridiculous sentences.
And how is this educational? While playing, not only are students being exposed to a variety of quotes by classical Latin authors, but they also learn additional vocabulary and reinforce grammatical concepts such as part of speech, declension and conjugation. You see, players are encouraged to read the sentences in Latin and inflect appropriately.
Surely this game is more suited for advanced Latin classes, then? Every Word Card includes basic inflectional data, just in case the students haven't memorised their paradigms yet, as well as clues to determine the meaning of the word, such as synonyms, definitions or pictures. Ideally, students should be able to figure out what the words mean without needing to consult external resources like dictionaries or encyclopaediae, in order to facilitate play (but of course reference tools should not be discouraged). Further, you can customise the game by adding the cards labelled 'advanced', which cover topics more suited for upper-level classes, such as deponent verbs, oratio obliqua, historical events or people, or Roman culture.