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