It probably won’t surprise you to find out that staff meetings at Pine Cove typically include some sort of “seriously fun” element. For example, Chapel in East Texas always starts out with some friendly competition, that usually borders on ridiculous. “A game with a twist,” they often say.
Some of you may have seen examples like this at family camp or at youth camp before meals, but we also think any of these would also make a great addition to your next family gathering or family game night!
This is a classic stage game. It’s great before meals at camp, it’s great on your coffee table at home, it includes zero real skills, and anyone can play! We like to play boys vs. girls (obviously), and each team takes turn adding one block to the single stack, until it falls. If your team makes it fall, you lose! (you can use any size wooden blocks for this game)
This is a full-crowd participation game, and very fun to watch! At your house, Just Dance might be a normal occurrence. At camp, it’s unique. We pick a Just Dance song off of YouTube, play it in the gym or dining hall, and tell everyone to pick a character to follow. Fun fact: At the Towers this summer, the Mystery Madness activity class played this so much together that the counselors memorized their dance, and eventually filmed their own version.
You’re probably familiar with the classic game, Jenga. It’s always a hit. Giant Jenga really steps it up a notch, especially with a big crowd! We often play 2 on 2, and one member of each team is blindfolded. The blindfolded player is the only player allowed to touch the jenga pieces, and (you guessed it!) the other player on their team gives directions. It’s a crowd-pleaser for sure!
There are hundreds of “minute to win it” games out there, but our go-to often involves Oreos. One person is matched against another person, and neither is allowed the use of their hands. Each player has an Oreo on their forehead, and has to somehow eat and swallow the entire cookie with no help. The first person to finish for their team wins!
It turns out, there are quite a few verses from the book of Lamentations that sound extremely similar to an old Taylor Swift song lyric. It’s hilarious to watch this stump people, and only takes a little bit of preparation by the moderator. Can you guess these correctly? (Answers below)
There can be as many teams in this game as needed, but each team needs a newspaper or a section of a newspaper. We pick a set amount of time for the timer (just a couple of minutes), and the team to come up with the most creative sentence out of words from their newspaper wins!
There are all kinds of trivia games out there, but we like to play the ones with the most random questions we can think of. For example, two teams will be lined up on stage, and the first person to hit the podium gets to answer first. Questions might be easy or impossible to answer, like these examples:
A couple of years ago, this game took the internet by storm, but trust us when we say it never gets old. Buy some disposable dental mouth guards (like these), and make a list of tongue twisters. (They work really well if there are a lot of M’s and P’s especially.) One member of the team has to wear the mouthguard and try to get their other team members to guess the phrase they are saying. Prepare to laugh till you cry!
Answers to questions above:
Lamentations or Taylor Swift lyric?
Trivia questions:
Posted Oct 16, 2018
Categories: Inside the Cove (Browse all)
Click here to sign up for our Inside the Cove newsletter!
