I haven’t been to a youth group in a while unless it’s to collect Our Sidekick from church and even then I don’t really hang around for long (mainly so I’m not like an embarrassing parent lol).
A few weeks ago JD and I were discussing games to play at the youth group and that their youth group needed some more games to play, I ended up suggesting a bunch. A week or JD asked if I’d go and run some games at their youth group – well okay as long as Our Sidekick comes with as I am on Sidekick Duty that night.
Most of the games I remembered from teaching them in workshops and things like that but I also went to find them on the web. Figured the easier way to keep a record of them and know where to find them again if JD or her youth group wants the info is to blog about it.
Captain’s Coming, Zip Zap Boing and Splat! can all be found here. (One of the young people led Zip, Zap, Boing! but it had different rules depending on who is playing so it’s always handy to have a copy in case things get rowdy lol).
We also played “What Are You Doing?” It’s actually a drama exercise to introduce improvisation and things like that but it’s still good fun (and with a silly youth group you get awesome responses rather than boring every day things!)
Everyone stands in a circle. The first player takes their position in the centre of the circle and starts miming an activity. As soon as that activity is clear, player 2 steps into the circle and asks “What are you doing?”
The first player says an activity that has nothing to do with what they are actually doing for example if they are miming cutting the grass, when they are asked what they are doing he might say washing a car.
When the first player steps away player two starts mining the activity that player one told them. A third player comes up, asks the same question and so play continues. It’s a case of keep going until you’ve had enough – I’m sure if you can keep coming up with ideas you can keep going, you can add the idea if there is hesitation or the activity is repeated then you can exclude people until you have a winner.
At the end of the evening Our Sidekick and I got grilled in the HotSeat – it’s the youth groups initiation of sorts for visitors – it was good fun but there were really random questions like politics or existentialism?
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Image via GarlandCannon
