STARING CONTEST
We’re all familiar with staring contests. To play, two people must stare at each other until one gives in / shrieks / blinks / runs out of the room in tears. As is the raison d’être of this page, it’s a very simple game. You can add a slight twist to this by making a group-wide staring, knockout contest, with winners progressing, until you’re left with one starer standing.
HUMAN NOUGHTS AND CROSSES
We’re huge fans of any games where you take something small, and make it bigger by getting people involved: rock, paper, scissors (curled up in a ball for rock etc.), battleships (put up a screen in the room and get people lying down in specific places) and table football (strap people into lines where they can only move from side to side). But those are all far too complicated for this page, so instead: human noughts and crosses. Set up nine chairs in a three by three grid and split the group into two teams. Line the teams up and designate them noughts and crosses. The person at the front of each line chooses their position (with the team taking it in turns), taking their place on the grid while making a human ‘nought’ or ‘cross’. The first team to get three in a row… DO WE REALLY NEED TO EXPLAIN THE RULES OF NOUGHTS AND CROSSES?
HIDE THE LIAR
Imagine ‘cheat’ crossed with ‘wink murder’. No, not a game that involves throwing cards into people’s eyes.
Send one member of your group out of the room… and see how long you can keep them out there for before they start asking questions. ONLY JOKING! (Though that would be a particularly ingenious game for any particularly annoying young people.) So, send this person out of the room and once they’re outside, decide on one person left in the room to be ‘it’. Invite the person back into the room and say they’ve got two minutes, as many questions as they want, and three guesses to figure out who ‘it’ is.
STRANGE DOCTOR
Not to be confused with the upcoming Marvel movie, Doctor Strange.
Again, start by sending someone, your ‘doctor’, out of the room. Once they’re out, give everyone left a strange ‘disease’ such as ‘thinks they’re a chicken,’ ‘is actually a newborn fawn,’ ‘has no concept of personal space’ (possibly not best for teenagers) or ‘is convinced someone is spying on them.’ Once the ‘doctor’ re-enters the people in the room have to act like someone with that condition while the doctor figures out what’s wrong with them.
SING SONG PING PONG
Split your group into two and pick a team to start. The group, or a member of it, must sing a line from a well-known song. The opposing team then has ten seconds to respond with another well-known line from a song, but it must contain an identical key word to the song the other team sung. So if the first team sung, ‘Whoa-oh, we’re living on a prayer’, they could respond with ‘When you call my name, it’s like a little prayer,’ but ‘I’m on a boat’ (shout-out to T-Pain) would not be acceptable. The game continues until a team fails to come up with a response, and the other team gets a point.
