What are some great large-scale outdoor games?

July 11, 2008 2:42 PM

What are some creative outdoor games that would work for up to 400 people and within 20 - 30 minutes or under?

I'm doing an outdoor event at a public park so physical risk level, messiness, simplicity, and damage to the property need to be taken into account. Last year we did : three-legged race and balloon toss. This year I'm thinking tug o war and treasure hunt. What else?

posted by Jenna Roadman to sports, hobbies, & recreation (6 comments total)

Octopus was my favorite as a kid, but I'm not sure how it'd work with that many. (When we played, the tagged people were "tentacles" instead of "seaweed.")
posted by Metroid Baby at 2:51 PM on July 11

British Bulldogs, a variant of Octopus.
posted by fire&wings at 3:00 PM on July 11

A scavenger hunt with lots and lots and lots of blatantly obvious clues/answers (that can be found by more than one group, like find "an oak leaf") plus a decent collection of pretty hard clues that are worth a lot more. Then the teams have to reason between getting a ton of the easy clues that everyone else is going to get or just a few of the really hard and high value clues.
posted by Science! at 3:20 PM on July 11

A giant game of capture the flag

You could also modify the scavenger hunt to include doing things at various stations...such as "do 20 jumping jacks" or "spin around while singing happy birthday." but you would need someone overseeing that station to check off that a team completed the task.
posted by hazel at 3:31 PM on July 11

A nice variant on hazel's is to have some of those activities correlate with team size. For example, "for every 5 people on your team, bring the organizers 1 batch of home-made cookies" or whatever.
posted by whatzit at 3:26 AM on July 12

Amoeba Race (scroll down). The site has suggestions for other games.

FWIW, the text for Amoeba Race is lifted directly from The New Games Book, which had a lot to do with popularizing these kinds of activities.
posted by hydrophonic at 7:06 AM on July 12