I had this idea for a game. Reporters under deadline pressure, making the calls real reporters make — publish fast or verify first, take the story or spike it, protect the source or follow the lead. The kind of thing that sticks with students longer than a worksheet on journalism ethics ever does.
So I looked for it. Board game sites, TPT, teacher forums — nothing. Journalism-themed games that were really just trivia with a press-badge sticker on it. Nothing that actually forced the speed-versus-accuracy tension I wanted students sitting inside of.
So I built it myself.
See it on Teachers Pay Teachers — $9.99
Fifty story cards across breaking news, politics, investigations, sports, and lifestyle. A complications table that mirrors real reporting obstacles instead of feeling random — a source goes dark, an editor pushes back, a document surfaces mid-round and changes the math. Then the part nobody tells you about making a classroom game: playtesting it, finding out round six drags, cutting it, playtesting again, finding out the scoring doesn’t reward the right choices, fixing that, playtesting again — eventually landing on something that plays clean in forty-five minutes and actually teaches what I wanted it to teach.
You don’t have to do any of that part. That’s the whole point of putting it up for ten dollars — so the next journalism teacher with the same idea doesn’t have to spend the weekends I spent getting it right.
Leave a comment