Passport to the Past: A C2 Speaking Journey
An advanced board game where C2 teens navigate 24 travelling scenarios using sophisticated past forms. Players encounter nuanced communicative tasks rooted in real travel situations—missed flights, cultural misunderstandings, unexpected encounters—that demand authentic negotiation, storytelling, and perspective-taking. Each prompt requires genuine exchange of information, opinion, or reasoning, not rote grammar practice.
A free Board Game for Teens at CEFR C2 level. Topic: Past forms.
Speaking prompts on the board
- Ask your partner which past travel experience fundamentally altered their worldview and why.
- You have 60 seconds to convince your team that budget airlines have irrevocably changed tourism for better or worse.
- Act out a traveller experiencing severe jet lag at an airport immigration desk—your partner must guess what went wrong.
- Describe a moment when cultural misunderstanding abroad taught you something unexpected about yourself.
- Ask your partner: had you never travelled, how might your assumptions about other cultures have differed?
- Your team must agree: which historical travel route—Silk Road, Grand Tour, or modern backpacker circuit—shaped civilisation most profoundly?
- Stand up and mime a traveller's frustration at a lost suitcase—exaggerate everything your partner sees.
- Explain how tourism in a place you've visited has changed since your first encounter there.
- Ask your partner what they would have done differently in a travel crisis they once faced.
- Compare how you travelled ten years ago with how you travel now—what shifted in your priorities or methods?
- You have 30 seconds to present the most absurd travel superstition you've encountered or held.
- Discuss with your group: should wealthy nations have restricted tourism to preserve endangered destinations?
- Act out a traveller negotiating a refund with a hotel receptionist after discovering a serious problem with the room.
- Analyse how your relationship with a particular country shifted after visiting it versus before.
- Ask your partner: if you could undo one travel decision, which would it be and what would you choose instead?
- Your team must reach consensus: is authenticity in travel possible, or is all tourism inherently performative?
- Stand up and show with your hands and body how you felt the moment you arrived in a transformative destination.
- Evaluate whether travel had lived up to expectations you'd held before departing on your most significant journey.
- Ask your partner which travel companion from your past you wish you could revisit a destination with now.
- You have 60 seconds to persuade your team that one overlooked destination deserves as much acclaim as popular tourist hotspots.
- Act out a traveller explaining to a local why they've returned to their village after many years away.
- Reflect on how a past travel experience reshaped your understanding of privilege, access, or global inequality.
- Ask your partner: what assumptions about travel did you hold as a child that you've since abandoned?
- Discuss with your group whether travel should be considered a human right or a luxury that perpetuates inequality.