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It’s Homework: The Game! Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons is a board game that the characters on the show Gravity Falls played. This game involves plotting out/planning an adventure and it dissuades almost everyone in Gravity Falls from playing the game. The game characters come to real life and play the game, but you don’t really see the rules.
**If you are here for only the math activities, just scroll to the bottom of the page for those. You can incorporate those into this game even for kids who don’t know anything about this television show.**
I decided to make up rules for this game, but I avoided the intensive planning portion of the game so young kids can play. The part of the game play we see is the character battles. This involves rolling dice, so I tried to incorporate that into this game. I also use a die with more than 6 sides. If you don’t have those already you can get Polyhedral Dice, 2 X 7-Die Complete Dice set for Dungeons and Dragons DND RPG MTG Table Games,Packet of 14
First you need to print out the GameBoard and either find little toys for game pieces or make your own. I made these out of Sculpy. They are some of the icons from the Bill Cipher zodiac. You’ll also need little things to represent Summerween loser candy and points. I used beads for these.
Rules:
The object of this game is to be the first person to 5 points (you can make it go to 10 if you want the game to last longer). 1 point can be won by battling Bill, which you must do if you land on a square with Bill on it. 20 candies also equal 1 point. A Bill toy (or a triangle) should be passed around so that the player to the right of the person whose turn it is has Bill.
Put all the game movers in the start square. Let the youngest player go first. They will roll the 20 sided die to determine how many squares to move. Move along the board following the arrows. Once you get back to start, you just keep going around again. If the player lands on a blank square it is the next player’s turn. There are 3 special squares you can land on.
Summerween Watermelon = Role a 6 sided die. The number on the die determines the number of candies you receive for that turn.
Mystery Shack Question Mark = The player gets asked a question by one of the other players. If they get the correct answer they get 10 candies. This question could be a trivia question about Gravity Falls or a mysterious creature. I’ll put sample questions at the bottom of this post.
Bill Cipher = Get out a 10 sided and an 8 sided die. The 10 sided one is for Bill and the 8 sided one is for the player. The 10 sided one I used has a 0 and a 9 on it, so 10% of the time Bill would win against any player’s roll and another 10% he will lose against any player’s role. Before you roll the dice you can decide to boost your strength. Pay 3 candies to increase the number you roll by 1. You can pay any number of candies that you own to boost your score. When you roll your die shout out some kind of creative weapon. One of the other players will act as Bill and shout out his diabolical attack. Whoever rolls the highest number (taking into account any candies you paid) wins. If the player wins, they get a point. If Bill wins he takes one of the player’s points away. If the player doesn’t have any points he will take all the players candy. If it is a tie the player doesn’t win or lose a point.
The person with the Bill toy will roll for Bill and make up his attacks if the player lands on the Bill square, or ask the question if the player lands on the Mystery Shack Question Mark. After the player finishes the action of the special square, it is the next player’s turn. The players continue circling around the board until someone reaches 5 points.
You may want to come up with questions for the Mystery Shack Question Mark squares or things that you can use for your attacks. This game can be made simpler for younger players by making the trivia questions easier for them. You could also remove the option to pay candies ahead of battling with Bill.
I’ve got sample questions below. You can make up questions from any of these categories. You may want to stick with only trivia questions or if you are playing this game in a math class you may only want to ask probability questions. If you’d like to see more Gravity Falls crafts take a look at my Mabel Crafts post and my other Gravity Falls crafts post. There are also more ideas on my Pinterest Board.
Sample Mystery Shack Question Mark questions:
Gravity Falls Trivia:
These can range from easy questions like “What is the name of Mabel’s pig?” (Waddles), to more difficult questions like “How many members of Sev’ral Timez are there?” (5) If you are playing with really dedicated fans you will want to make the questions more difficult.
Monster/Myth questions:
“What country is the bunyip from?” (Australia)
“What real animal does the Loch Ness Monster look the most like? a) an elephant, b) a plesiosaur, or c) a sea dragon?” (a plesiosaur)
You can also get questions from Gravity Falls: Journal 3
Decode a phrase:
You can make a decoding wheel like this one and have the player find the secret message.
Probability Questions:
“What are the odds?!” – Probabilitor
The Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons game master is named Probabilitor so I thought this would be an appropriate category. These questions wouldn’t be for very young kids, but could be given to someone playing who hasn’t seen Gravity Falls. This is also where the “Homework the Game” name comes true. I think the first questions here would be appropriate for grade school students, and the last concept is something taught to undergraduates in introductory genetics classes.
You can use little toys of your own for this, but here is an example.
You can use counters like this to have kids figure out simple probabilities, like the following.
What is the chance of choosing:
A sea animal = 11/51
A kangaroo = 20/51
A red animal = 7/51
You can also use this to explain the “and/ or” rule. If you say “or” you add the probabilities, if you say “and” you multiply the probabilities. This is to determine the odds of two or more events happening. At this point I think it is important to note that you replace the items between each draw. If you don’t replace the item, then the odds of the second draw change and that would make things needlessly complicated. I think confusion about this explains why people think that if you have drawn a blue animal a few times, it is more likely to draw another color. If you have been removing the blue animals and keeping them out of the pool to draw from for example, it would be less likely to get them the next draw. However, most applications of this rule involve something like flipping a coin. Both sides of the coin are always present and each flip is independent of the one before. It does not matter how many times the coin has come up heads, for the next flip (the events are independent) . This is also true for genetics. The genes are always present to choose from no matter how many children have come before.
What is the chance of choosing a blue bear or a sea horse? 5/51 + 3/51 = 8/51
What is the chance of choosing 2 blue bears (a blue bear and a blue bear)? 5/51 x 5/51 = 25/2601
What is the chance of choosing a red bear and a seahorse?
Now this question is tricky because you could draw the red bear first or the seahorse first. So the answer is:
red bear (5/51) and a seahorse (3/51) or a seahorse (3/51) and a red bear (5/51), so 5/51 x 3/51 + 3/51 x 5/51 =
30/2601
What is the chance of choosing anything but a bear? Now for this one you could add up all the chances of getting all the other animals, but that is time consuming and you could easily make a mistake. There is a simpler way. The sum of all the outcomes is 1. So you can easily find the chance of drawing a bear (20/51), so just calculate 1- 20/51 = 31/51
You can also use this as practice for converting fractions to decimals. I think it also makes more sense to compare 13.7% to 1.2% instead of 7/51 to 30/2601.
The and/or rule is taught in genetics when explaining the Hardy-Weinberg principle which is a very important concept in population genetics. This rule is often used as a quality control measure when scientists are studying human DNA.
If you are doing this as a classroom exercise, you can have different groups of kids make multiple draws and record the results. Then they can compare the frequencies that they observed with the total from the whole class. This exercise is to demonstrate that the more times they draw, the closer their observed probabilities reflect the true odds.
If you have gotten all the way to the end or this, thanks for reading!!!!!!!!! Hopefully this was clear. If not, you can comment here, or on Instagram or Facebook and I will try to clarify.