In my idea, an object such as a photograph would be placed in the middle of the table to become the focus of discussion. Students would be rostered to choose the object of the day, because I thought that might aid motivation. Teacher and students would then sit around the table, and in turn, students would perform certain activities regarding production, translation and comprehension of phrases and sentences pertaining to the central object. The activity to be performed would be selected by some agreed mechanism, be it the roll of dice, by what the teacher feels the student is ready for, or some combination.

Activity #1 would be to produce a phrase/sentence in your own language, which the teacher would translate into the target language and write down on a card. (This would let students explore the target language like a detective by enquiring about sentences slightly beyond their current vocabulary and grammar.) Activity #2 would be to produce an original sentence in the target language, and write it down. (Again, giving students control over their own learning.) Activity #3 would be to pick one of the accumulated cards at random and translate its contents back into your own language. For all activities, details could be adjusted depending on the sophistication of the students and other factors.

I am not sure whether this idea (after fine-tuning) would have any potential as a language-learning tool, but I expect that it would be very limited. It would depend upon having a group of just the right size and a teacher who is proficient at instant translation. I also think it would be best suited to beginning students learning a language not too different from their own (say, another Indo-European language written in Roman characters). Altogether, a rather small niche.

I know what you mean about the details for games like that. It’s hard to keep track of everything, especially in bigger groups. I have a travel Scrabble game called Scramble, which uses dice and only one active word on the board at a time. It’s quite fun in small groups, and the letter dice were really handy for playing word games (say a word starting with the letter you roll, etc).

I once had an idea for a table game for beginning language learners, but I expect the idea has a lot of problems in the details, among them the fact that it requires the luxury of a teacher who can make quick translations on demand.

I don’t know if I’ve ever played Scrabble as such. I’ve certainly played “Take Two”, which is a game that uses Scrabble tiles but not the Scrabble board. I think a lot of people play a game like that, and that far more people own a Scrabble board than play Scrabble.