Objective: To get your youth group to work together, and the first team to finish all the riddles and bring back all of the cards with clues is the winner!
Items Needed: List of riddles\clues, tape, multi-colored 3×5 cards or multi-colored printing paper
How To Play:
We just did this with our teenagers this past Wednesday and they had a blast! Most of your work happens before the game. Simply go throughout the building you have your teen service in, and look for good places to leave clues. I recommend taking pictures of the rooms it will help you later when trying to come up with riddles. You will need about 7-10 places (we had eight locations with clues) then the fun begins. For each location write a riddle\clue that will lead them to another location with another clue, and so on until you write one for the last location. That clue will be a riddle telling them to go back to the place where they started. This is how the game will end with all of the teams ending up at the same ending location. Put one clue for each team at every one of the locations (I recommend not putting the same clues at every location or teams will just follow other teams. Put Team 1’s first clue at location 1, put team 2’s fifth clue at location 1. This way the teams will not follow each, but all go to the same locations.) And you are done! Just make sure the last location you place per team is the clue that leads them to the finish line and the game works itself!
Everyone starts in the same location. Divide the group into 2-4 teams (we had four teams and divided the youth group into 7th-9th grade girls, 10th-12th grade girls, 7th-9th grade boys, and 10th-12th grade boys. Boys vs Girls is also a great way of doing it if you want to do two teams. Another way that is fun with just two teams is 7th-9th vs 10th-12th.) Tell them the rules to the game which are as follows: 1 – no taking\hiding\moving another teams clue (because each team has a clue in the same spot, but not the same clue – hence the different colored papers) If they move\hide\take another team’s clue then they are eliminated from the game for cheating and trying to hurt the other teams. 2 – tell them the boundaries (i.e. No clues are in bathrooms, no leaving this building, no going in the pastor’s study, etc.) 3 – all of our team must be present before the next clue can be read (this will keep the team spirit in the game). Tell the teams which color clues are theirs, and hand them the first clue and start the timer. The rest is up to them. You get to relax and stay in the room where they started because that room is where they will end! Enjoy it, and get pictures!
Below is some of the riddles I used and pictures of the area where I put the clues
