Last night at youth activity at my church, we played a couple games. Here are the general rules:

Baseball

Kids write down four things unique to them on different color note cards: 1st base: something easy to guess 2nd base: something more difficult to guess 3rd base: something few people know Homerun: something that almost nobody in the group knows.

Then, you divide the group into two teams. One person goes up and chooses a card that represents what base they want to get to.

Which cards?

1. You can have each team choose their own teams' cards
2. You can have each team choose the otehr teams' cards
3. Or you can mix it up and have everyone's cards mixed together. (we did this one)

The team continues until there are three outs (three times they don't guess the right person). If they guess the right person, they go to the base indicated.

For example, I choose a 3rd base card. I read that card and it says, "I love to mountain bike". I guess that John loves to Mountain Bike, and he says that was his 3rd base card, so I move to third base. Michelle goes next and she chooses 3rd base, too. She gets it wrong, and we have one out.

Then Natalie goes and she says that she wants a home run card. It is "I won an award for something." She choose Katelyn. Katelyn says that was her card, and Natalie and I both go home, and we get two points.

Seats

In this game, there are chairs set out in the mostly empty room. One person is it, and stands, away from the chair. The goal of the group is to ensure that person doesn't get a chair.

Rules: You can't do something that would hurt someone. You can't move chairs.

This game took a couple minutes for them to figure out the strategy, but once they did, it was a lot of fun.

Yes, it got crazy. No, nobody got hurt. Yes, everyone enjoyed it.

I love games that allow people to define their own level of engagement.