Pass go and collect kelly forceps!

April 9, 2012 1:23 PM

How should I plan and make a surgical instruments board game?

I need to memorize a lot of surgical instruments. I have made flashcards for them, but I have over 300 flashcards already, and I'm looking to make this fun for myself and some classmates. Any ideas on how I can do this? I'd like there to be some kind of story line involved.

posted by OsoMeaty to Education (10 answers total)

The contestants can be surgical nurses, and the ones quizzing them can be surgeons who call out, "Hand me a scalpel!" (or whatever) and whoever picks the right one first wins each round.
posted by xingcat at 1:26 PM on April 9, 2012

How many classmates are you involving?
posted by cashman at 1:28 PM on April 9, 2012

Building a board game is going to involve a lot of effort that doesn't directly help memorization. Does it need to be a board game? Why not something simple that uses your flashcards?
- a variation on Set where you have to find something in common between the instruments to create a set (could feature names or images of the instruments. You could predefine the attributes that should be looked for, or if you know them reasonably well you can allow any well justified association).
- plain old Memory.
- combination of the two, where each instrument is assigned to a group according to some logical association, and it is a 'pair' if you turn over two instruments in the same group.
posted by jacalata at 1:31 PM on April 9, 2012

There's a game my family plays [with nouns instead of instrument flashcards]; the name just flew out of my head.

Throw a couple dozen flashcards in a bucket. Two teams. Rounds of whatever length.

Round 1:
Get your teammates to identify the instrument by saying anything but the name of the thing.
Round 2:
Get your teammates to identify the instrument with charades.
Round 3:
Get your teammates to identify the instrument by saying a single word.

You'll have to take care that one expert on either team doesn't stomp on everyone else and not give them the drilling benefit. Maybe everybody has to do it individually to the whole group?
posted by chazlarson at 1:55 PM on April 9, 2012

Go Fish is another game that could be easily adapted for your purposes. Divide the instruments into groups of four or make decks with a number of instruments repeated three or four times.

I had this Composers card game as a kid, which is basically the same thing.
posted by hydrophonic at 2:12 PM on April 9, 2012

Charades for 300+ surgical instruments? Challenge accepted! Gonna go fine tune my cutting/slicing arm motions now.
posted by hellomina at 2:13 PM on April 9, 2012

I would buy a preexisting board game, one that I could swap out a mechanic fairly easily and one that I'd want to play on its own after the studying is done. In this situation, I might pick up Thebes, which is a game that's won by "digging up" buried treasure. You do this by pulling tiles out of cloth bags. But instead of digging up the game's victory point tiles, you could replace them with flashcards. Once you get a flashcard, you get to keep it if and only if you can remember what it is. This even works thematically because in the real game, in order to draw tiles, you need to gain knowledge first. Which is basically what you're doing.
posted by smorange at 2:16 PM on April 9, 2012

So this is probably as good a time as any to introduce you to a game I like to call "THE WORST SOLITAIRE." The game is set up as follows:

   +----------------------------->
      +----+    +----+   +----+
    ^ |back|    |front   |back| +
    | | 5  |    | 4  |   | 3  | |
    | +----+    +----+   +----+ |
    |                           |
    |                           |
    | +----+             +----+ |
    | |front             |front |
    | | 6  |             | 2  | |
    | +----+             +----+ |
    |                           |
    | +----+             +----+ |
    | | 7  |             | 1  | |
    | |draw|          Discard | v
    + +----+             +----+

Cards are advanced, one space at a time, from the draw pile to the discard pile, flipping over each time they are advanced. In order to flip a card, you must reproduce from memory the material on the opposite side. You are allowed to remember incompletely until the card is in position 2, at which point you must either have the material down cold (and get to discard it at position 1) or return the card to the bottom of the draw pile (position 7).

The end result is that you get to have all the monotony of looking at flash cards with the added bonus of systematic, forced repetition. I originally developed this method while taking college Arabic; now it's the only thing between me and failing med school pharmacology and microbiology. That said, the game is awful; only marginally better than repeating pharmacology, which I can only assume would be twice as monotonous.
posted by The White Hat at 3:15 PM on April 9, 2012

To clarify: once you've flipped a card (say, from 2 to 1). you then try to recite and flip the next card (3 to 2) and so on until you reach the draw pile. The game is won when all the cards have been moved from the draw to the discard pile.
posted by The White Hat at 3:18 PM on April 9, 2012

Sounds like it's crying out to be themed around serial killers...
posted by Leon at 8:30 AM on April 10, 2012