WORLD COIN GAMES DEBUT IN VIRGINIA

Gary provided some detailed instructions with rules and gameboards. See the earlier E-Sylum article for more information. Yesterday, at the Annandale, VA Coin Show my friend Tom Kays and I ran our first World Coin Games, letting three teams compete for rewards and bragging rights.

I thought I was getting there early but Tom already had the room nearly set up. There was still work to do though, as we set up piles of coins on each table and set out more donated material on the giveaway table. Show organizer Wayne Herndon arranged for a larger room for us, and it worked very well.

Our fellow Nummis Nova member Jon Radel arrived to help as did Fairfax Coin Club member John Hutcheson. But Tom had done all the preparation and the lion's share of the work, and deserves all the credit for the event's success. The kids and parents all had a great time, and the din in the room was almost deafening as conversations about coins erupted in every corner. Here are some photos. -Editor

What we did right was to have coins from over 170 countries seeded into the mix, advance set up with world maps for each team, magnifying glasses, lists of counties by continent, post-it notes, pencils, a timer with bell, globe, tooth pick flags of many nations, reference books, and team tables ready to go with a pile of coins ready to be sorted.

We planned up to five runs, of from five to ten minutes each, to have the kids find one coin from each continent, to match coins with flags, to find ten coins for a single continent chosen at random from cards, and further runs not played, to find coins not issued by any of the 197 independent countries, (think dependent territories) and to find coins from the two most distant points on the globe. Doing all would have taken an hour for our three teams of five kids, but we cut it short to stay within 40 minutes.

We allowed parents and helper Numismatists to answer questions, and had a hard time keeping parents with younger kids from running the show for some teams. I was most impressed by Red Team who, without instructions, had guessed what was about to happen and had opened their map and already found coins for five of the seven continents by the time the game started. We had them dump those coins back into the pile to restart that first task at the same time as the Yellow and Green teams.

The first to finish, or the team with most matching coins took the honors for each task with the grand prize winners taking the globe as a trophy, (for the remaining duration of the event.) I think Nummis Nova can recommend this game as a fun and fast-paced, cooperative/competitive event that would tie-in nicely with the World Cup or Olympics. Kids may not be taught geography in this age of iPhones, but I saw no one using a phone or game in boredom while the timer was ticking. That is a success.

I'll get back to it when school starts up -- pit the high schools against each other -- then challenge other towns.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
INTRODUCING: WORLD COIN GAMES (http://www.coinbooks.org/v21/esylum_v21n20a27.html)