Monthly Archives: May 2015

Fun Group Games: The game should be easy for someone to join mid-game

I gave a brief overview of the top ten things a group game should have in my earlier post, but now I want to explain why those are the top ten. Over the next few days I will be posting those explanations.

The game should be easy for someone to join mid-game

Whenever you have a large group of people, chances are that not all of them join at once. If it’s not possible to join a game that has already started you leave several people bored, which is what you are trying to avoid while playing a group game. Even if they can join, but it takes forever to get started again, the game is less fun.

An example of a hard to join game would be Ninja, because once the game has started no one is allowed join until the end of the (often long) game. Two examples of easy to join games would be Tag, for hopefully obvious reasons, and Gaga Ball (or Biscuit Ball, as it is often called), because even though no one is allowed to join once the game has started, the games are usually so fast that you won’t be waiting long before you can get in.

 ~ Ruficalix

Fun Group Games: The game should be easy to get started.

I gave a brief overview of the top ten things a group game should have in my last post, but now I want to explain why those are the top ten. Over the next few days I will be posting those explanations.

The game should be easy to get started.

As anyone knows who’s tried to get a bunch of people to try a new game, the longer it takes to get the game started the less likely you are to actually play it. Also, the longer it takes to get the game started the longer people are bored. Between the two, the games that work best are often rather easy to start compared to games which don’t.

An example of a hard to start game would be Signs, because it needs everyone to choose a sign and show it to everybody else (for those who haven’t played, this takes a very long time, especially with the large groups that the game is best played with). An example of an easy to start game would be Ninja, because all you need is for everyone to get in a circle, do a countdown, and start.

 ~ George

The Top Ten Things to Consider for a Fun Group Game

There are many games, but some work better in group situations than others. By group situations I mean situations in which you have lots of kids (or teens, or adults…) and want them to all start playing a game, like at a birthday party. So, having played and directed a lot of group games, I thought I’d come up with ten things to look for in a good game for your group. To clarify, a good group game should keep as many people continuosly entertained as long as possible. This is what I was looking for when I put together this list:

  • The game should be…
  • Easy to get started
  • Easy for someone to join
  • Easy for someone to leave
  • Fun even for those who aren’t very good at it
  • Fun even for those who are very good at it
  • The game should Not be…
  • Too rough
  • Easy to cheat in, or even easy to accuse people of cheating in
  • Boring for those who are playing
  • Boring for those who are temporarily not playing (tagged, substituted, etc.)
  • Full of “losers” at the end, or at least those who lose shouldn’t feel like “losers”

Of course, a game can still be fun (and usually is still fun) without all of these factors, but I’ve found that the more of the 10 factors a game has the more likely a group I’m playing it with will want to play it again. More on that in a later post. There are probably other factors that would affect how fun a game is to play with groups, but as of now I can’t think of any others. There are so many things about this that I want to elaborate on, but for now I’m going to post this so that I can get this started.

~ George