The Noisy Games | The Wayward Melody

The Noisy Games is a game that touches all other topics and skills learned Language Level 1 (and even a bit of Level 2)! It’s a very simple game that people of all ages can play and enjoy, which can practice language on several different levels.

The Code Cards display an illustration, as well as how to break that word into syllables/phonics/letters. The card basically says “this creature means A, that creature means D, and so forth”. The player whose turn it is now has to create a new word with that code. They arrange the monsters to display it and give a hint.

Everyone else must guess what the hint means and what word you wrote. In so doing, they try to “crack the code”, and guess what each creature represents. The more people guess right, the more points you score. But if you made it too easy, and everyone got it right, then you get nothing!

This extra step of creating a “code” (through cute recognizable monsters) makes it all possible. It means players don’t have to know the alphabet yet, or know many words, and they can all play and communicate through them.

If everyone understands letters, you can play the codes such that every Noisy Tongue represents a letter.
If everyone merely understands phonics (“sounds in a word”), you can make every Noisy Tongue represent a phonic.
If everyone merely understands syllables, the Noisy Tongues can represent syllables.

Once everyone is familiar enough with the game, you can ditch the Code Cards entirely and let everyone make up their own codes!

Fun Fact: The Noisy Tongues are fun creatures (with prominent tongues …) known from our early-language story The Noisy Tongues.

REMARK! The rulebook contains a clear overview of how to pronounce each phoneme! You can keep this cheat sheet at hand while playing that variant of the game.

REMARK! This game includes a material generator! This is just a file you can open in any browser. It allows you to completely customize the material and generate a new PDF. For example: pick a bigger size or disallow difficult cards. Our Material Generator system is a custom tool that we’ve developed over 5 years of making games (at Pandaqi), which means it’s powerful and we use it ourselves. We hope you find it useful too!

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Product Contents

Below is a summary of this product's contents. The actual product might have even more inside, but never less.

Rulebook for the game (1 page base game, 1 page expansions, 1 page explaining how to modify the game to suit different needs, 2 pages phoneme cheat sheet)
Material PDF (code cards + noisy tongue characters to cut out; 1 pdf in color, 1 pdf ink friendly)
The Material Generator (open in any browser) to generate your own PDFs with your preferred settings!