Sixteen sports, two at a time, and the child says which one they would rather do. Nobody has to be any good at them, which is the whole point: a child who sits out PE can still hold a firm view on surfing against running, and this is one of the few sports activities they get to win.
The sixteen sports in the deck
Ball sports first: soccer, basketball, American football, baseball, tennis, hockey, bowling and golf. Then the ones without a ball: swimming, cycling, skateboard, skiing, surfing, running, boxing and karate. The list mixes British and American naming on purpose, so soccer sits a round away from American football and a child picks up both words in passing.
Each card is a large sport symbol on a tinted background with the name underneath and a short shout beside it. Strike! for bowling, Ace! for tennis, Ollie! for skateboard, Slapshot for hockey, Hole in one for golf, Hi-yah! for karate, Catch a wave for surfing. Those lines do more teaching than they look like they should, because the vocabulary that belongs to a sport is usually the part a child has never heard, and here it arrives attached to the picture.
The sixteen are shuffled and re-paired on every load, so no matchup is fixed and reloading gives a different set. A straight run is eight rounds and uses every sport exactly once, which is the tidiest fit of any deck here: nothing sits out and no sport comes round twice.
Playing a round
Two sports side by side, a VS badge in the middle, one tap to decide. On a keyboard A or the left arrow picks the left sport and B or the right arrow the right one, R picks for you, and a swipe works on a tablet. The cards stay readable at arm's length on a tablet propped on a table, which is where most of this gets played.
The counter reads Round 1 of 5 at the youngest ability level, or Round 1 of 8 above it, eight being the whole deck. A Choose for me button sits under the cards for the child who cannot separate two sports they both like. The end screen is a podium of the top three with one named as the top pick, a sticker for that sport, and a Show session log button that opens a timestamped, printable list of the eight matchups in the order they came up.
Run it as a sixteen sport knockout
Add ?mode=bracket to the end of the address and the deck stops being a series of pairs and becomes a tournament. Sixteen sports enter the first round, the eight winners meet, then four, then two, then one: fifteen matches and a single champion. Sixteen contenders is exactly the number a knockout wants, so this is the deck where that mode comes out clean, with no byes and nothing left over.
There is no button for it anywhere on the site, so the address bar is the only way in. It is worth the typing when you want a longer activity with a real ending, or when a group needs to settle on one sport and the process has to look fair to everybody. The counter changes with it: instead of Round 1 of 8 you get Match 1, Match 2 and so on.
What you are left with is one sport that beat everything it met, which gives a session a single thing to come back to next week. Why did skateboarding beat swimming, and would it beat it again today?
Talking points a sports deck opens up
Sport is a subject almost every child has been made to do and a fair number have quietly given up on. Offering it as a preference instead of a performance changes who is willing to join in. A child who cannot catch is still entitled to think basketball looks better than golf, and saying so costs them nothing. Used one to one, it is often the deck that gets a reluctant child talking first, because it is a subject they already have opinions about.
It is also unusually dense with useful language. Verbs, equipment, places, teams against individuals: eight rounds throws up a lot of it without anyone announcing a topic.
- Action verbs: kick, throw, shoot, swim, ride, jump, hit, run.
- Equipment and kit: ball, bat, racket, board, gloves, helmet, skis.
- Places: pool, pitch, court, slope, sea, rink, ring.
- Sorting: team against solo, indoor against outdoor, and which of these need water, snow or ice.
- Reasons asked after the pick rather than before it, so no choice is blocked on producing a sentence first.
- Follow-on questions with somewhere to go: which of these have you tried, which would you try, which is on this weekend.
A sample of the sports line-up
- Soccer
- Basketball
- American Football
- Baseball
- Tennis
- Hockey
- Bowling
- Golf
- Swimming
Questions about the Sports deck
- Is the sports picker game free?
- Yes. No signup, no download. It runs in the browser and the results and stickers stay on the device, so a child can play a run and close the tab with nothing left behind and no account created.
- Which sports are in the deck?
- Sixteen: soccer, basketball, American football, baseball, tennis, hockey, bowling, golf, swimming, cycling, skateboard, skiing, surfing, running, boxing and karate. A standard run pairs them up fresh and uses all sixteen across eight rounds.
- Can we run a tournament with all sixteen sports?
- Yes. Add ?mode=bracket to the end of the page address and it plays as a knockout instead: sixteen become eight, then four, then two, then one champion, fifteen matches in total. There is no button for it, so the address bar is the way in.
- Does a child need to be sporty to play it?
- No, and that is much of why it works. Nothing is timed, nothing is scored against another player and no physical skill is involved anywhere. Preferring surfing to golf is an opinion, and an opinion is not something a child can be behind on.
- Does it work on a tablet or over a video call?
- Yes. Taps and swipes both work on a tablet, and on a screen shared through Zoom, Meet or Teams the cards stay large enough for a child to tell the two sports apart. Nothing needs installing at either end and there is no login step to get past first.
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