This is a real gem of a game, which I picked up from Matt, one of my old colleagues. Unfortunately, I had completely forgotten about it and so haven’t played it for ages – I came across the cards when I was tidying through my resources folder.One of the great things about The Bomb Game is that it’s so versatile : you can use it for grammar practice, vocabulary revision, general conversation…and much more. And the students love the competitive nature of it, so they have fun playing it too.

In terms of preparation, all you need are 16-20 pieces of card (depending how long you want to play for) and put on them 5, 10, 20 or a picture of a bomb. You can decide as well the ratio; when I played before with 16 cards I had five each of the 5 and 10 point cards and three each of the 20 and bomb cards.

Stick the cards on the board face-down with a grid-style outline, as shown above. Divide the class into teams and invite the first team to choose a card. Vary the difficulty of your questions depending on how many points the card is worth and keep a score of the points won on the board. If a team turns over a bomb card, they can choose another team to lose all their points.

Some things to think about when playing the game: