Castle Attack Review Game

This Castle Attack Review Game has teams of students choosing either to build up the defenses of their own castle or attack the castles of other teams. It can be used with any subject or topic.

Supplies for Castle Attack

Castles

To play Castle Attack with your students, you will need a picture of one castle for each team. I printed a piece of castle clipart on different colors of paper and laminated them. You could also challenge your students to draw their own castle on the dry erase board if you wanted to try and bring out their creative sides.

I have uploaded my castle posters at the bottom of this post.

Stars

You will also need some sort of way of showing how many defenses each castle has. When I first started playing this game with students, I printed stars and added ceramic disc magnets on the back. Later, I wrote a grant for magnetic review game supplies and received a set of pre-made star magnets.

Don’t want to bother with magnets? I’ve seen others have students draw and erase stars with dry erase markers.

Questions

This game can be used with any set of review questions for any subject or topic. I personally tend to use this game with AP-style multiple choice questions from College Board’s AP Classroom website.

Method of Submitting Answers

Since I am using multiple choice questions, I have created a set of multiple choice cards for each group so they can select their answer and place it in one of the mini magnetic pockets on my dry erase board. (If you are doing true/false questions, I also have a set of true/false cards that you can print and use.)

This is completely optional, but this has been a huge game changer in my classroom. Previously, I would have students write their answers on individual dry erase boards and hold up the answers. This kinda worked, but it always felt like students were sneakily trying to change their answers or wait until they saw someone else’s answer to write down their own. With these multiple choice cards, students have to commit to an answer and lock it in by placing their ring of cards in the mini magnetic pockets face down.

It is so fun to get to reveal the answers of each team to the class by flipping over the cards one by one.

How to Play the Castle Attack Review Game

Divide the class into teams. I have my six tables in my high school math classroom, so I typically have 5-6 teams depending on the class size of a particular class period.

Set up 1 castle for each team (or have them draw their own).

Decide the number of stars that each team will begin with. I typically recommend 3 or 4. Place this number of star magnets by each castle or draw in that many stars with a dry erase marker. (The choice of a star here is completely arbitrary. Feel free to change to a different icon.)

Pose a question to the class. Have students submit their answers. I have students place a multiple choice card in a mini magnetic pocket that is labeled with their team name on the dry erase board.

Reveal the submitted answers and work through the problem with the class if needed.

Each team who submitted a correct answer sends one team member to the board to take their decided action. This team member has two options:

1. Add a star magnet to their team’s castle. This builds up their castle’s defenses.
2. Remove two star magnets from the board. They can remove two star magnets from a single castle or one star magnet from two different castles. Remind students that attacking another castle DOES NOT make their castle stronger. The removed star magnets go to the side of the board – not their castle.

Groups who have run out of stars on their own castle may still attack other castles. I’m not entirely sure how it would effect the game play if you required them to add to their own defenses if they were out of stars. I think it is certainly worth a try.

In the past, I have sometimes had an issue with each group waiting to see what the other group is going to do. I solved that this year by taking a numbered popsicle stick for each team that answered correctly and shuffling them to determine the order in which the teams would take their actions.

Repeat the process with a new question. With the AP classroom questions, I can typically get through 11-12 questions in a 50 minute class period.

When time runs out or you run out of questions, the castle with the most star magnets wins.

Game Variants

Math Medic refers to this game as Ultimate Castle Attack.

When I shared this game on my Math = Love Facebook page last year, there were tons of creative comments with game variants including a sand castle version, a Harry Potter version, and a version where each castle has a moat and gold and the gold can’t be stolen until the moat has been destroyed. So creative!