You could add some fun by putting objects in the middle of the path and asking them to circle around it going and coming back. The first team to fill their bucket wins.
How to Play: Take the large playing cards and tape the printed images on the face of the card. Mix them up and place them face down on a table. Assign a time limit for each turn and time each student. Each youth will come up and try to find all the matches in the quickest time.
How to Play: Purchase enough tennis balls for each team. Collect enough clean aluminum cans to use as bowling pins. You can fill the cans with sand or pebbles to make the game a little harder. Recruit leaders to help keep score for each team. Each student gets two chances to know all their cans down.
Assign the starting score of 50 points for each turn. Deduct 10 points for each of the cans that remain upright. The team with the most points wins. Harvest Hay Maze Materials Needed: Take advantage of the late summer hay harvest by setting up a challenging hay maze. How to Play: Locate a friendly farmer who will loan you a trailer full of hay bales. Draw your complicated maze on paper for that the volunteers can see the design they are working toward. Recruit adult leaders to set up the maze.
Bribe them with food, and you will get more to help. Set a timer and have the youth start one at a time. Once one is halfway through the maze, start the next player. The person who gets through the maze the quickest wins. Dunk the Youth Pastor Materials Needed: Your youth will line up for an opportunity to play this game, so you should brush up on your Bible trivia.
Each youth gets a turn at asking you, the youth pastor, a question. Each wrong answer results in a turn, hopefully, to dunk you. This is a fun summer game that would be great for use with your youth Vacation Bible School. How to Play: You will choose your own trivia questions or facts and write them on an index card.
Set up enough whiteboards for each team. Divide your youth group into teams. Give the first player of each team a trivia subject to draw. Have your youth leaders keep track of the teams who successfully guess their subject.
The team with the most completed trivia questions wins. Pin the Answer on the Map Materials Needed: All you will need to do this fun question-and-answer time is a map of biblical Israel, pushpins, and a list of geographical questions. How to Play: Prepare a list of questions on biblical geography. You should have a well-balanced list of questions, from easy to hard. Here is an example: Question: Where did Jesus walk on water? Answer: The sea of Galilee. Easier for those newer to the faith and harder for those who have been in church for a long time.
Place your map of Israel on a bulletin or corkboard. Provide enough color-coded pins to cover all your questions. You should have a different color for each team. Divide your group into small teams. Every student should answer a question.
If the student answers the question correctly, they get to put the pin on the map at the location they answered. If they answer incorrectly, the question goes back into the mix. Once the students have answered all the questions, the one with the most pins on the map wins. Guess Who Materials Needed: This is an easy way to just have some fun.
How to Play: Choose one student to leave the room. They will be the ones asking questions. All remaining students in the room will sit in a circle. The student outside now returns to the room blindfolded and enters the circle. How to Play: Choose two students to start the game. They sit in chairs facing each other. Give one of the students some index cards with random words written on them.
Assign a time limit to the game. Start the timer, and the person holding the cards says words that will lead the person opposite of them to guess the correct word. The team wins if they can get through all the words given to them. If they lose, they are out. If they win, they wait for a playoff. Once all the teams have had a turn, you take all the winners and start the process all over again to pull out the next group of winners. Now, do a playoff round.
The team to guess the greatest number of cards wins. Pick Your Box Materials Needed: This is based on the millionaire game that was popular a few years ago. How to Play: Get a large selection of cardboard boxes and write large, bold numbers on one side with a marker. Fill each box with something. It could be a box of balloons they escape when they open the box , or it could have some candy or treats. Every box should have something inside, but one should have a special gift.
Maybe a gift card to Sonic or another favorite local spot. Create a list of trivia questions that are a review of material you have studied over the past few months. You should also include some basic questions to use if you have new members in your group. Set up your room like a game show set. Organize the boxes on tables, and have the youth leaders bring the boxes to the students. Line up the students and start the game. You go until someone gets the box with the special gift. A student must win an opportunity to open a box.
Start by asking the first student a trivia question. If they answer the question correctly, they get to choose a box. Help Me, Who Am I? How to Play: Write the name of famous people with a marker on an index card.
You can choose biblical characters, or movie stars, authors, or all these mixed. Have the room set up so that you have chairs in groupings of two, facing each other. Have enough chairs for all the youth to sit in. Divide your youth group into sets of two and put tape on the index cards, and tape it to their foreheads.
The students take turns asking questions about who the person is that trapped to their forehead. Set a time limit and then say start. They take turns asking questions. They ask questions until they have both identified the famous person written on the sticky note on their forehead.
This continues until all the students have had a turn or until time runs out. The quickest score wins. How to Play: Set up a playing field or gym with stations of fun things. Example : The index card states that they must put the firefighter pants on and run back across the field to the next team member. They take the pants off and give them to the next player, who puts the pants on and runs back over to the station.
Now that team member is in play. They must choose the next station to play, and it is the bucket. The instruction is to put the bucket on your head three times, turning in a circle. And they take the bucket to the next team member, who returns it to the station. The next member chooses the baby stroller station.
The note says that they must push the stroller as quickly as possible around all the object staging areas. These are just some examples — you can be as creative and fun as you want to be. All the teams will play simultaneously, so it will be chaotic fun! A team is out when each member of the team has completed one of the staging areas. The game is over when all teams have finished or until your set time is up.
At each station, you will have an index card telling the students what they have to do with the item. How to Play: Start by locating some hysterically funny items. These may be white elephant gifts you received, or they could be things you have purchased at a local thrift store. They can be a souvenir spoon from a strange place, a homemade ashtray, a coffee mug with a funny saying on it, just really anything that you find bizarre or just hysterical.
Hide each item somewhere around the church, outside or inside. As you hide the items, stop and write a clue card. Give each team a set of clue cards. Assign a time limit to the game, and the team who finds the most objects wins. Guess the Youth Group Member Materials needed: In this game, you request for your students to make a list of interesting facts about themselves, and others guess who the fact belongs to. How to Play: Give each student an index card and a pen, and ask them to write an interesting fact about themselves.
They should write something that other students do not know and include their names. Collect all the cards from the students. You then play the game show host and read the interesting facts that were provided and ask the students to guess who it is. How to Play: Make a simple sheet for each student.
Make sure they write their name at the top. All you need to have is the numbers one through five with lines next to them for them to write on. Give each student a sheet of paper and instructions to write five things on their paper. The items they write can be true or false. Collect the sheets from each student.
You can have a prize for any student who fools everyone, and no one guesses correctly. Cupcake Decorating Contest Materials Needed: For this game, all you will need is cupcakes and supplies to decorate them with. How to Play: Purchase or bake enough cupcakes for each player to have one. You will want to have extra in case there is a visitor. You also need plenty of decorating supplies.
Be creative and come up with some ingenious decorations for them to use. We may need to make them yourself. Create a list of prize categories. Some examples could be most creative, most colorful, craziest, or most artistic. Have a prize for each category. Recruit enough judges for each category.
Possibly two or three. Assign a time limit for the decorating. Jenga Trivia Materials Needed: Your students will be brushing up on the Bible knowledge to play this classic game with a biblical spin. How to Play: Set up several tables with Jenga towers. Create a large number of trivia questions.
Divide your students into teams. The object of the game is to answer the trivia question correctly. If you answer the question correctly, you are safe and do not have to remove a piece of your tower.
If you answer your question incorrectly, then you must remove a piece from your Jenga tower. The last tower standing wins the game. Speedy Yahtzee Tournament Materials needed: This is a perfect game for a youth camp or lock-in night. How to Play: Collect enough Yahtzee games for each one of your groups. Divide your youth group into small teams. You will start each group playing their games simultaneously. They must move fast. You will have a playoff where the winners of each table then play each other.
You can do your playoff one-on-one. If your group is larger, set your tables up with multiple winners in the second round. The winners of the second round well then play each other for the third round.
The last two players square off against each other to see who the Yahtzee grand champion will be. Make a cheesy trophy to give to the winner. How to Play: Purchase enough balloons for your group.
We will need two plastic laundry baskets or buckets. They will keep their water balloons in one and an empty one on the other side for them to fill. Divide your students in half, and then line them up, facing each other on the grassy field.
The object of the game is to toss water balloons from one player to another. At the end of the game, the most water balloons in the basket wins. What Comes Next? How to Play: The students start with their Bibles closed. Then you give them the name of the book of the Bible you will read from and tell them what the radius is. For example, you plan to read starting in John Then you would tell them you are reading from John 13, 14, or Assign a time limit for each reading.
They will search the three chapters to find where you are reading. Once they determine where you are reading, they should start reading with you. This shows they have found the correct place. This game helps your students learn to move easily through the Bible on their own. How to play: Have enough plastic Easter eggs for each team member to have a turn.
You want the eggs to be empty, so they are harder to keep on the teaspoon. You will need an egg carton for each team and some spoons. Place the egg cartons on a table. Divide your youth group into teams and give each team an egg carton, eggs, and spoons.
The object of the game is to transfer all the eggs by spoon to the egg carton without dropping or touching with their hands. A youth leader places the egg on their spoon to start them off. If they drop the egg en route to the table, they return and start again.
Assign a time limit and let the students start. The first team to fill their carton wins. How to Play: Collect enough paper towel rolls for each team. Purchase enough paper plates for each youth to have a shot at the target. Cut a hole out of the center large enough to fit easily over the paper towel roll. Purchase enough paper plates for each player to be able to have a shot at the target. Assign a point amount to each plate and have enough team leaders to keep score.
Divide your youth group into teams and start the game. Each youth should have the opportunity to toss their paper plate at the target, trying to get a ringer.
You can play a quick round and give each student two chances to through their plate, or they can have several runs at it. The most points wins the game. The Flying Saucers Materials Needed: You will need paper plates, string, some chairs, and ping pong balls. How to Play: You will string your targets across an open space and will be moving. Play the game inside or outside. Cut holes in the center of your paper plates, and punch two holes on the top edge of the plate and then two more on the bottom edge of the plate.
Use the string to thread through the plate on both sides. String 4 plates across with 12 inches between each plate. Next, tie one side of the strings top and bottom to the back of a chair.
Next, stretch the string tight so that the plates are flat. Your target is now ready. Repeat until you have enough for each team. You can play this game in two ways. First, have the plates running horizontally, and the object of the game is to toss 4 ping pong balls through the holes in each of the plates. The second way to play is to align the plates vertically like skeeball and assign points to the plates. The plate furthest from the student would get the most assigned points and the one closest to them the least points.
Assign youth leaders to help with keeping score and a runner to bring the ping pong ball back to the next player. The game continues until all the youth have had a chance to toss all their ping pong balls.
The team with the most points wins the game. Button Up Materials Needed: Locate several very large shirts, one for each team. How to Play: The object of this crazy game is to see which team can put the shirt on and off the quickest. Assign youth leaders to each team to ensure they adhere to the rules.
The rule is to put the shirt on and button it all the way up. Then, unbutton and give the shirt to the next player on your team. The team with the quickest time wins. Bowling with Bottles Materials Needed: You will need a bunch of empty 2-Liter soda bottles, dirt or stand to partially fill the bottles, and enough round balls for each team. How to Play: Fill your bottles partially with dirt or sand.
Put enough in to make them hard to knock over, but not too hard. Assign point values to each bottle and youth leaders to keep score. Divide your students into teams and start the fun.
Each team member has 2 turns to knock all the bottles down. The most points wins. This is a fun game of bowling that is easy to make a bowling alley. Ice Breaker Game Materials Needed: You will need a poster board, colored pens, and an empty soda bottle. How to Play: Draw a large circle on the poster board. Divide into sections like a pie and color each square.
Write a get-to-know-you question in each square. For example: Tell me about your favorite trip? What is your favorite dessert? Do you have any pets? Put the soda bottle in the center to use as a spinner for your wheel. Ask your kids to sit in a circle. If the group is too big, make enough poster boards to divide your group into smaller groups.
One player spins the bottle. They ask a student they do not know the question the bottle stops on. There is no win or lose to this game. It will help your youth to get to know each other. You can even shuffle the players after half of the assigned time has lapsed. This is a great game to play in the fall when there are a lot of new students entering the group. It is simple to design using a poster board and a z soda bottle. Continental Chess Materials Needed: You will need craft paper or poster boards, markers, tape, and missionary instructions.
How to Play: Label the continents and countries. Write instructions on the index cards like: Your church has sent you to work as a missionary in South America. The student will move to the South American continent. The next student gets a card that says: You have finished your work in Russia and now are going to work in Australia.
That student will move from Russia to Australia. This will cause the player to leave the game. You should add information to each card about the location and their spiritual condition.
Keep track of whose turn it is by writing the names of the students on a whiteboard and assigning a leader to put a mark by each name as you give an instruction to move. You move them with the instruction cards until they get the return home for a stateside visit card. You could play this game often and mix continents and countries, continents only, metropolitan cities, unreached people groups.
This is fun to play and can introduce your students to missionary work around the world. This is a chess game on the floor. You will move your students around from one continent to another. The game will help your youth learn about spiritual needs in other parts of the world, and it is fun. Leaves of Thanks Materials Needed: You will need a large number of varied sizes of fall leaves either real or fake , butcher paper, sharpies, markers, tape or staplers to attach the leaves, and bible verses.
How to Play: Write a title like Falling into Thankfulness on a large piece of craft butcher paper and add your church name and identify that it is from the youth group. The size of this paper will correspond to the size of your youth group, but it should be a big sign. Prepare bible verses on gratitude written on slips of paper for each student. Give the students a scripture paper, a sharpie, and several leaves.
Instruct them to write simple reasons on the leaves for which they are grateful. You and your youth workers should keep in mind that not all the students will have happy home lives, so be prepared to help these students find reasons to be grateful. Have the students take their leaves over to the large white paper and attach them wherever they want. Each student should also write the scripture verse you gave to them. Praise the students for their choices of why they are grateful.
Encourage the students to always search for reasons to be thankful. Display the completed sign in the church. You can use it as a decoration for a Thanksgiving Fellowship event or a community meal. Your leaf gathering will help bring color to this fall activity. The activity will provide a fun way to apply a Bible study on being thankful. Love for Seniors Materials Needed: You will need sheets of colored stiff paper or card stock, various colors of markers, stickers, pens, scissors, glue, tape, glitter, sticky notes, or index cards.
How to Play: Request a list of your most isolated senior adults from the church office. Write their names on sticky notes or index cards and place them in the center of each table.
Divide students into small groups, pray for them, and ask them to make cards for the people named on the sticky notes or index cards at their table. An alternative option for youth in the older age group is to provide greeting cards. The older students write personal messages to the people they choose. Gather the cards and envelopes containing the names and mail them. For an added step of service, your group could also deliver the cards to each person. This activity is a great way to apply lessons on loving and caring for the vulnerable in our society with very little expense.
It is easy to forget the seniors because many are no longer able to attend church. Cookie Love Materials Needed: You will need cookies homemade or store-bought , small paper bags for the cookies, colored pens, Bible verses, and scripture stickers optional. How to Play: Prepare a lesson demonstrating the love of Christ for the outcasts of society. To do this, coordinate the best time to donate cookies to your local food kitchen or homeless shelter. Buy or bake a large number of cookies and buy cookie bags.
The students will decorate the small paper cookie bags with Bible verses. Choose verses that talk about the love that God has for us and how He sees and hears us when we call out to Him for help. To fill the bags, the students should wash their hands or use gloves.
They fill the decorated bags with cookies. If you prefer to seal the bags, you can use scripture stickers. Arrange a time for the youth to serve the cookies at a local shelter if the group is old enough. If your group is too young to go to a shelter, you could pray over the cookies together. You and your youth workers can deliver the cookies. Adopt a Needy Nursing Home Materials Needed: You will need construction paper, glitter, glue, scissors, pastor boards, markers, tape, string, etc.
How to Play: Locate a nursing home in a needy part of town and obtain permission from the director to decorate their facility for Christmas.
Spend time over several youth group meetings making decorations. You can make snowflakes to hang from the ceiling, Christmas posters, Christmas scriptures, etc.
Choose a night to take the decorations and decorate the facility. There are many good ways to make this a big event. You can decorate the facility and have a Christmas party complete with music and a lesson on Christ.
You could also adopt the residents and have each student and their family bake their person a Christmas treat. They will know who in your church membership needs some help with painting.
When the music starts contestants have to complete challenges without use of their thumbs: Retrieve their shoe, and put it back on and tie it. Peel the banana. Unwrap the present. The first one to complete everything wins! Get creative with other hilarious things they could do without thumbs.
Or get creative …beans Gun Gun Obvious motion here …beats Gorilla Winners play each other until one wins above all. Twist: Have ever loser follow the winner around the room and cheer obnoxiously loud for them. The second contestant does the same for the third. If your game leader is engaging, this can be really funny for everyone.
At the end, the game leader asks each contestant what they thought they were acting. Everyone wins! Having a Missional Mindset.
Ways to Encourage Youth Leadership. The goal is to get 4 of your team onto the same couch. There must be one less seat than people in the room must have a couch; you can play three on a couch if necessary.
Divide into at least two teams and have everyone put their name in hat. But everyone should keep their names a secret. Now the person to the left of the empty seat in the room calls out a name. The person, who drew that name, now moves to the empty seat, and switches names with the person who called out the name. Now the person to the left of the new empty seat calls a name.
You repeat the process. So you have to try to get to the empty the couch and call the right names to get folks on the couch. This takes some thinking but is fun and competitive in a non-athletic way. Each person should write down the names of 10 people — either famous people or people everyone in the group knows. Go around and collect them in a basket or hat. You should have quite a few names in the basket. Split into 2 or 3 teams each team having around three or four members.
Round One. Pick a team to start — one member of that team gets the basket of names, picks out a name, and has to try and describe that person to the other members of his team. Once they guess correctly, pull out another name from the hat and so on. The team has one minute to go through as many names as they can. If they get stuck on a name, they can pass and move onto the next name.
Move onto the next team who do the same as above. Round Two. Similar to Round 1 but you can only use one word to describe the person to your group. The group will be aware of all the names in the basket from round 1 so it is easier than it sounds.
Score a point per name guessed as above. Round Three. Add up the scores at the end to see who wins! If you have a group of athletic, competitive students this one is for you. Keep some band aids on hand for this one just in case. This one needs no explanation, but feel free to add twists. Include more than one flag, take turns having the teams play offense and defense, play with three or four teams going against each other, etc.
This is another classic, but is always a hit with youth groups. Make it extra fun by doing it once a year and utilizing interesting competitions: students vs. The key to a good match-up is to put a small number of the strongest against a large number of the weakest.
For example, take a handful senior high boys and place them against 30 middle schoolers. When there are more than 50 students, this game is a lot of fun. Play duck-duck-goose as you normally would, however when a few people get tagged and they go to the middle, then they begin another game of duck-duck-goose. Everyone is in a straight line, with multiple teams doing this. First team that gets to the last person and has the correct word wins.
Divide students into teams and have one student face off against another student from the other team. Play five seconds of a popular song from iTunes and have them guess. This one is a favorite because it requires strategy and teamwork. The game is divided up between two teams. The goal is to get a ball into a basket. This can be a basketball hoop, but I have found it just as fun playing it with laundry baskets placed on a table.
Each player has their own chair and is played in rounds. At the beginning of a round, the players have a short amount of time to place their chairs in a position. Once placed, they are not allowed to move from their spot. They then must pass the ball to each other, without it getting intercepted by the opposing team. After each round the players become more strategic and shift from focusing on offense and defense.
Likewise, a team that has no one in the middle of the field is unable to make an adequate pass to their teammates. An interesting side effect of this game is the loner and unpopular student will often become the most passed to player. They are the ones that are open, because the opposing team neglects to place a chair next to them to guard. Bible drills can be fun but with a twist on an old classic game, students can translate it into real life skills.
Instead of saying a specific Bible verse like John , have them find narrative stories like David and Goliath. After doing a few of these narrative type stories, branch out even further. Have them lookup a passage of the Bible that someone can use if they feel deep sadness, struggle with addiction, feel lonely, etc.
This really challenges the students to use critical thinking and provides them with skills they can use later in life. Give everyone a penny. This means the penny will lay flat on the chin and the students will be looking up into the air.
Last one standing with the penny balanced wins. It is quick and easy and the perfect game if you are waiting for doors to open before a youth conference or for your favorite Christian artists before a concert like Winter Jam, Creationfest, Soulfest or Ichthus retro reference.
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