What actually makes each game different
“Are these all the same game with different pictures?”
They share one shape — push your luck, decide when to stop — and underneath that they are genuinely different decisions. Here is what to look for, because the difference is what a class starts noticing after the third or fourth game.
COUNT TO THREE BAD THINGS. Skull & Roses, Brain Grab, Bomb Squad, Lucky Dozen, Piggy Points. You are watching a strike counter and deciding how close to the third one you dare get.
COLLECT WITHOUT REPEATING. Flip Seven and Mission to the Stars. The danger grows every time you succeed, which is the cruellest shape on the roster.
A LINE YOU MUST NOT CROSS. Target 21, Sum Surge, Chaos Countdown. These are the ones where a child can compute the answer, so they are the ones to pick when you want the maths visible.
SOMETHING CHASING YOU. Risk It Rally is the only game where the danger MOVES — you break away from the pack, the pack gets faster, and the gap can widen as well as shrink.
REPEATS ARE GOOD. Quack Attack is the only game where drawing something you already have is what you want — ingredients pair up and clear the bench, and five unpaired boils the pot over.
FAILING DOES NOT COST EVERYTHING. Streak Builder is the only one. Finished legs are banked and safe forever; dropping the baton costs only the leg you were running.
And one mode changes the shape of ALL of them: turn on Secret Commit and the class declares how far it will go before anything is revealed, which is the only time one student’s choice becomes interesting to another one.
Your students phone shows the state of the game, not just the result — the balloon inflating, the lion getting closer, the planks left to the chest, the pip total climbing toward 21. That is where the difference between the games is most obvious.