Shooting Gallery
Age 8+
15 minutes
Language
Competitive
In Brief
Learning objective
In Shooting Gallery, players train their vocabulary and reading skills. Simultaneously, they will practice their ability to overview a lot of data and sort out the relevant. The players will also need to work together and help each other in order to be successful.
Game objective
Each round of the game consists of two parts. In the first part, the players have to locate all the words amongst the pictures on the playing board. Also, the faster the players find the words, the more gold balloons will appear in the second part of the round which can prove to be essential for completing the round. In the second part of the round, the goal is to destroy all balloons before just one of them reaches the crossbows on the right side of the screen.
Gameplay
Finding words
In the first part of each round, every player has three words in front of them. The players need to find a depiction of these words as quickly as possible among the more than 100 pictures in the middle of the playing board. When the players believe that they have located the depiction of one of the words, they simply need to drag the shield that is located next to the three words and drop it onto the picture. If the player is correct, the picture will disappear from the playing board and the word on their list will be greyed out. If the chosen picture does not represent one of the player’s three words, the picture will remain on the playing board and the word will stay written in the same way.
The row of ten golden balloons at the side of the screen is a time indicator. The more time that the players spend on finding the words, the more balloons golden balloons will disappear. If all ten balloons become transparent before the players have managed to locate all the words, all pictures that are not on any of the players’ word lists disappear leaving only the pictures that the players should have found. To advance to the next part of the round, the players simply need to drag and drop their shield onto the remaining pictures. The number of golden balloons that are still lit up when the players have located all the words equals the number of golden balloons that will appear in the second part of the round. Shooting golden balloons in the second round of the game will reward the players with crucial gold coins.
Shooting balloons
After completing the first part of the round, the players are led to a new screen with four crossbows on the right side of the screen. Each crossbow has its own colour representing each of the four players. Balloons will start to appear on the left side of the screen and fly in the direction of the crossbows, and the crossbows will automatically begin to shoot arrows towards the balloons. If the crossbows manage to destroy all balloons, the players advance to the next level. If just one of the balloons reaches the crossbows, however, the game is over.
When almost all of the balloons are destroyed, one larger balloon with a number inside will appear. For every hit that this balloon suffers, the number will be reduced by one. This balloon will not pop until its number has reached 0.
Collecting gold coins
If the players have managed to find the words in the first part of the round fast enough, some of the balloons appearing on the screen will be golden. Each time a golden balloon is destroyed by an arrow, all players are rewarded with a gold coin. The players can use these gold coins for upgrading their crossbow in different ways.
The crossbow
From the beginning of the second part of the round (shooting balloons), each crossbow is able to shoot five arrows before having to reload. The reload takes a couple of seconds during which no arrow will be fired from the crossbow. Furthermore, regular arrows will disappear after hitting a balloon making them unable to destroy more than one balloon each. In order to have a chance of successfully overcoming later rounds where increasingly more and faster-flying balloons will appear, the players will need to have collected enough gold coins to upgrade their crossbows.
Buying upgrades for the crossbows
For the gold coins that the players have collected, players are able to buy upgrades for their crossbows. If the players should manage to successfully destroy all balloons, the upgrades that the players bought for their crossbows will be saved for future rounds. There are four different types of upgrades for the crossbows.
For the price of 5 gold coins, the players can buy arrows that create an explosion after hitting a balloon. These explosions will destroy any other balloons that are close enough.
Increasing difficulty
The game consists of up to twelve rounds. The difficulty of the first part of each round (finding words) will remain the same throughout the game. In regard to the second part of the rounds (shooting balloons), however, for every round that the players complete, the number and the speed of the balloons will increase making this part of the round increasingly difficult to win.