Winter Wonderland is a two player, Candyland® type board game built in IntelliTools Classroom Suite®. Simple enough for pre-readers to play, it’s exciting and appealing for kids at least through sixth grade.
A simple toolbar with buttons to choose a card, navigate, and indicate that the turn is finished controls all the action. Players move through a magical winter landscape on a path of brightly colored stepping stones, passing scenery such as a frozen pond, giant candy canes, a snowman, and a gingerbread village.
Players must match the color of the card they draw to the stone to which they have to move. The path is just long enough for a fun adventure, and sudden jumps to special stones make it exciting. Once a player passes the last special stone, almost any card lands the playing piece on the winner’s stone. Until that point, it’s impossible to guess which player will win!
There are custom IntelliKeys® overlays attached; a separate one for each player. There are also Dynavox® package versions of the two overlays to run the activity from Dynavox AAC devices. See the Special Needs Access section on the System Reqs page for information on controlling the Classroom Suite version activities from PRC devices.
Special Locations
Besides the colored stones, there are five special stones plus the victory star stone. Special stones activate wild and crazy animations, but only if you land there! The game automatically moves the playing pieces to the special locations when these turn up on the MOVE TO sign.
I included an announcement to prepare students for each jump, and each destination is named, so that the players won’t lose sight of where their game pieces land. Animations are mainly for fun, but also reinforce the result of moving to a distant location on the board.
Animations And Music
The animations are short but dramatic and include related music. For example, moving to Topper Tower, which stands beside a frozen pond, brings out a penguin who skates to a short piece from Skater’s Waltz.
Two of the special locations move the player past some of the stepping stones. The Rainbow Junction stone launches an expanding rainbow that carries the player’s game piece up to the next loop of path. However the Snow Slide shunts the player down to the next lower loop, so that the player is set back along the path.
Be Sure To Peek
I had a lot of fun working out how to do a two player game in Classroom Suite. For those of you who like to look under the hood, there are lots of sneaky tricks hiding in this one!
Special Bonus
There is a file of eight different color game pieces. Be sure to read the instructions to find out how to substitute these or other bits of clip art for the default game piece styles!
Applications needed: Acrobat Reader, IntelliTools Classroom Suite.
Subject area: Holidays.
Level: Grades K-6.
Downloads-Activities
Classroom Suite
WinterGameICS.zip (10 MB) Winter Wonderland Game in Classroom Suite v.3 or later. Custom IntelliKeys overlays attached, one for each player.
Winter GameDynavox.zip (307 KB) Winter Wonderland Game overlays saved as Dynavox package files.
WinterGameCreditsInstructions.zip (84 KB) Printable Instructions, notes and troubleshooting for Winter Wonderland Game. Acrobat Reader.
Downloads-Resources
extraGamePieces.zip (182 KB) Eight extra game pieces in JPEG format. Be sure to read the instructions on how to substitute these into the default playing pieces!
