HELENA — On a cold day in a garage in the Helena Valley, four people are racing to be the first to maneuver their pirate off an island with the treasure. They are playing “Buccaneers and Booty” a game developed by retired teacher and Army veteran Jeff Hunt.
It is one of more than two dozen games Hunt developed while teaching students at an alternative high school in Texas.
“The curriculum we had was really outdated and boring...to be honest,” explained Hunt.
Hunt developed the games to supplement the traditional way of learning that wasn’t always working for his students. They were inspired by history and the games he played growing up.
“We just had board games,” Hunt recalled. “We played a lot of the standards: Monopoly, Risk Stratego, Life.”
Now they fill his garage and are shared friends and neighbors, like Quinn Kurokawa who remembered the importance of this type of learning when he was in school.
“One of my history teachers had a kind of homemade history game on the colonial era history of the U.S. and that was probably the best quarter of the school of the year,” said Kurokawa.
Each game is mechanically unique. Some use homemade cards, others dice. They span from prehistoric times to the 1960s.
“The hippie game back there is a, uh, road trip,” said Hunt. “It has to do with Woodstock, the music festival in 1969. No one dies in that, but you have to think. It involves a lot of critical thinking.”
Hunt has poured thousands of hours into handcrafting different parts and pieces of these games and is now looking for a way to continue to share them and the experience they create bringing people together.
He would like to find a space where people can come and play his creations.
“To get people out of the house, away from some of these screens and interacting with each other,” said Hunt.
People can email Hunt for more information about the games and ways to support his mission of finding a place for his creations to be housed.
