ChoreWars – Make Chores Fun!

So Mr Woodpecker showed me the other night the most amazing website ever: ChoreWars

You know how you can’t get your hubby to get off Madden, or GuildWars 2, or World of Warcraft to come help you with the dishes or mow the lawn?

Or perhaps your kids are super motivated by games and rewards?

ChoreWars is just perfect. So Mr Woodpecker and I created accounts on ChoreWars and decided to make our ChoreWar pirate themed. So I am  Azriel the Pale and he is Bloody Tom Flint (both pirate name generated).

Then you add in chores to do. Give the chores XP and coin rewards. A chance for a super treasure and perhaps even an encounter with a monster! We tried to make all of our “mundane” chores into epic adventures. Instead of empty the dishwasher and load it again: “Scrubbin’ the Cap’n’s Cuttlery”. Instead of mow the lawn we have “Cut th’ Green Sea”.

Here is a screen shot of some of the adventures that Mr Woodpecker and I created to do:

 

You can see the name of the chore, what the rewards are, the 5% chance for a treasure or a wandering monster. And then on the right side is the amount of XP that you will get for completing the chore. The symbols underneath highlight what characteristics you need to have to complete the task (strength, constitution, dexterity, wisdom, intelligence, etc).

So, Mr Woodpecker and I had a fun time last night creating our chore adventures.

This morning? Well, it was a race to the dishwasher this morning to empty it and put in the dirty dishes so that we could claim our experience points.

For kids? Perhaps when they “level up” (perhaps reach a certain XP) they get a special rewards (date night with dad?)

Or perhaps you and your husband can trade in treasure for certain rewards (“I’m spending one Elixir of Life and a Silver Spoon to pick which radio station we listen to today”).

I could also see this working really well in an elementary school classroom to earn “points” for doing things in the class (picking up the books after story time, putting your chair away, etc). And the game is set up that you can have a Dungeon Master (teacher) and all the other characters as Non-Player Characters (students) so that the DM can assign the points to each student when they complete the tasks and then students can simply view their character sheets that show what they’ve completed and how much experience they’ve earned.

I know it sounds like this is a sponsored post or something like that by ChoreWars, but it isn’t. We just had so much fun setting this up and I thought it could be a great way to make chores a game in your house. I’m trying to figure out how I could use it in one of my classes without my students thinking it is too cheesy. But perhaps accepting the cheesy nature of it is what I need to do. =)