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MYSTERY MESSAGE
Not just a youth group game, but a skill for any future spies or blackmailers
10 mins
You never know when you might need to produce a blackmail letter in a hurry, so this game is an ideal opportunity for your youth group to hone those skills! Divide your group into small teams of three or four, and provide each group with a blank piece of paper, ample supplies of glue, and a newspaper. Explain to them that you are going to give them a sentence which they need to communicate in the style of old-fashioned movie criminals, by ripping out words and letters from newspapers and sticking them together to spell out that message. You will then judge the winning message based on the speed with which they put the message together, as well as the tidiness of the sticking and on its readability.
Make sure that the sentence you give to the teams is sufficiently challenging and unlikely to appear in any of the newspapers as a complete sentence. Giving the teams a Bible reference to write out can be a nice introduction to learning key Bible verses. This has the added attraction of requiring your group to find creative ways to present the Bible reference - the word Haggai rarely appears in newspapers!
BUILD A TOWER
Hopefully this never needs to be a transferable skill (if you need to build a tower in real life, don’t use newspaper)
10 mins
Divide your group into small teams and give each team some flat space, an equal pile of newspaper, and a single roll of tape. Explain that their task is to create the tallest free-standing newspaper tower possible (i.e. one that doesn’t lean on anything, and isn’t supported by anything other than the newspaper that you provide). It’s up to your discretion (and floor covering) as to whether you allow the teams to anchor the bottom of the tower to the floor by taping it down. Give the teams a time limit to complete their tower. Make sure you have some way of measuring the various towers produced.
NEWSPAPER HOCKEY
Nothing, nothing at all, like tonsil hockey
15 mins
Copious amounts of newspaper and tape, along with plenty of space, are required for this variant of hockey. Divide your group into two equal teams, and give each team a pile of newspapers, and some tape, along with the instructions that they need to use these to make a number of ‘hockey’ sticks. Explain that they can make as many or as few as they like, but they should ensure that they are as sturdy and durable as possible. You will need to construct some ‘ice-hockey pucks’ to play with (these should be discs of paper about 5cm thick, tightly bound together with tape, ideally with two flat and smooth sides).
Once the teams have finished constructing their sticks, and you have your pucks, get the two teams sat on opposite sides of the hall. Go along each team and individually number the players, so that you end up with a player on each team numbered one, a player on each team numbered two and so on. Place a chair at each end of the hall and explain that the aim of the game is to score a goal by hitting the puck between the chair legs. Place one of your carefully constructed pucks in the exact centre of the hall and explain that you are going to call out a number at random, and that the two players with that number have to grab one of the sticks their team has made and try to be the first player to score by hitting the puck into the goal. Make sure that your teams know which goal each is aiming for! Once a goal is scored the pair goes to sit down, and you should reset the puck, remove each stick and call out another number.
Crucially, play will only continue as long as each team has a ‘stick’ that they can play with - once a team has exhausted all the sticks they’ve made the game is over, and you add up the total scores, awarding a bonus goal for each remaining stick to the team that made them, to find your winners.
BAGS OF RUBBISH
The fastest and most efficient way of tidying the room
15 mins
With all these paper-based games, you will have plenty of rubbish left over, so why not make a game out of it? Divide your group into teams (as many or as few as you like) and give each team a black plastic bag, and award a prize to the team who can fill their bag with the most paper.
If your group is wise to this kind of sneaky game / chore, give each team a black bag as above and an equal-sized newspaper, and explain to them that their task is to make their black bag the biggest it can be (with the widest circumference, and as tall as possible). Make sure they know that by crumpling up individual sheets loosely they can make larger balls of newspaper and by fitting them carefully into the bag they can optimise its size. Give them a time limit for this and at the end of it judge each bag, putting them all into an order of success. Award one point to the last placed team, two points to the team above them, and so on.
Then announce there is another part of the competition - they have to compress their bags of newspaper to make it as small as possible. Leave them to work out for themselves their favourite technique, but again give them a time-limit to complete this in. Compare the sizes of the bags to see which is the smallest, again putting them all into order and awarding points from last place (one point) up to the winners before declaring the winners to be the team with the highest points across the two parts of the competition.
