Over the last few years I've been slowly amassing a collection of board games. They're great for teaching flexibility, patience, turn taking, planning, strategy and basic maths. And they're also heaps of fun to play especially when you choose games with themes you're interested in as well as gorgeous design and production values.

When we visited some very good friends in Tassie they introduced us to the fabulous Poetry for Neanderthals game. In this game a speaker uses words of one syllable to describe a word written on a card. Their team tries to guess what that word is. If the speaker uses words of more than one syllable, they get hit over the head with an inflatable club. Super fun!

Once we played this game, I went hunting for more poetry themed games. I couldn't believe that as a poet, I didn't already own any! Any excuse to buy and play more games really. And because it's poetry I can pretend that it's for 'work'. Win-win.

I managed to track down the excellent Haikubes and Paint Chip Poetry, both from the excellent USA publisher Chronicle Books. I fell in love with this publisher when I was in my twenties and reading the Griffin and Sabine Books by Nick Bantock. Both of these are a kind of hybrid beast - not quite game and not quite a poetry prompt but fun to play with a group of people.

If you're interested in checking out games / tools that work as prompts for writing, check out this post. And if you come across any poetry games, please let me know.