Grudgeball (also spelled Grudge Ball) is a fast, competitive whole-class review game. Each team starts with ten lives (shown as hearts on the board); teams answer your questions to knock lives off their rivals, then take a bonus shot at a bin or hoop for extra points. It's a brilliant no-prep way to revise any topic before a test — and this digital version runs straight on your whiteboard, free.
I use it at both ends of a topic, which is not how it is usually described. At the end it is revision, and everybody expects that. At the start it is a way of finding out what a class already knows before I have taught them anything — and children are far more honest about what they know when it is a game than when it is a quiz. Nobody minds getting one wrong when their team is about to take two lives off somebody anyway.
Have the conversation before the first question, not after somebody is upset.
At some point in any game a team will feel ganged up on, because that is how the game works. The team in front is the obvious target, everybody can see the scoreboard, and the maths of it points at whoever is winning. If a child meets that for the first time halfway through a round, it lands as unfairness. If you have said at the outset that it is going to happen, that it is part of the game rather than personal, and that it will come round to everyone in turn, it lands as something to be weathered instead.
That is honestly most of the value. Losing ten lives you earned and carrying on anyway is a genuinely useful thing for a child to practise, and there are not many lessons where it comes up.
You need a bin or a box in the middle of the room, two lines of tape on the floor — a near one worth two points and a far one worth three — and something to throw. Balled-up paper is what most people use; a sheet of A3 scrunched tight holds its shape better than A4 and throws straighter.
Putting the bin in the middle rather than at the front matters more than it sounds. Teams throw from where they are sitting instead of queueing at one end, which keeps the shooting to a few seconds a turn rather than becoming the slowest part of the game.
Three to six teams works best. You choose them yourself — there is no class list to load — and the two approaches that work are numbering the class off around the room, or simply playing table against table.
Table groups are faster to organise and children enjoy defending their table. Numbering off breaks up the friendship groups and stops one table being stacked with the confident children, which is the one to reach for if you already know which team would otherwise win every time.
This is the part that removes the preparation. Type in your topic, the app writes a set of questions, and you preview them and change anything you do not like before you launch. The whole set-up is a topic name and a minute of reading, rather than an evening of building slides.
Read them properly rather than trusting them. You know what your class has actually been taught and how the wording needs to match what they have seen, and fixing three questions before you start is far easier than fixing them live in front of thirty children.
It works as a reward at the end of a lesson that has gone well, and that is most of how I use it. Which means it works the other way too: a class that knows the game is coming, and knows it can be lost, has a reason to get through the work first.
The only care needed is following through. A reward that never gets withheld stops being a reward, and one that gets withheld unfairly poisons the game itself.
Grudgeball works for any review content and any age from primary upwards — English, maths, science, history, geography, languages, or general knowledge. Swap in your own questions and the same game fits every lesson.
Is Grudgeball free?
Yes — it's one of Sage Teachers' free-to-try apps. No subscription is needed to play.
How many teams can play?
It works best with 3 to 6 teams.
Do students need their own devices?
No. It's a whole-class game run from the front — one board, one ball, one bin.
What's the difference between Grudgeball and Trashketball?
Both involve shooting for points, but in Grudgeball teams take lives off each other — the "grudge" — which makes it more competitive.
Is it spelled Grudgeball or Grudge Ball?
Both — it's the same game either way.
Like whole-class games run from one screen? The Big Ten and Behind the Tiles work the same no-device way — and Spin the Wheel picks which team goes first.
Where the game comes from: Grudgeball was invented and shared by Kara, a teacher blogging at To Engage Them All, in 2013, and has been passed around staffrooms ever since. This is our own scoreboard version of it; Sage Teachers is not affiliated with or endorsed by the original author.
Written by a practising primary school teacher, and part of the free-to-try classroom tools on Sage Teachers. Last checked August 2026.