Free Team Building Games
Team building and Youth Group Games
Four simple filler games for team building or youth groups.
When you’re looking for some simple games for youth groups or team building, often the easiest are the best!
I run a youth group most weeks and as a result over the years have become quite adept at finding filler activities for when planned activities run short.
These are our four go to standby games that need little advance preparation and can all be planned and running within 5 minutes.
Empire.
How to Play Empire
What do you need:
One small scrap of paper per person.
Pens.
One “moderator”.
How to run:
Ask each person to write on the paper a name of a famous person or character. It can be anyone they like so long as everyone is likely to know who it is. They need to remember WHO they have written on their piece of paper. They should not tell anyone who they have written down.
The slips of paper are collected in by the moderator.
The moderator now reads out in turn the slips of paper like this:
“In the room today we have….”
Someone is nominated to start. The idea of the game is to match the people on the slips of paper to the person who wrote it. Each person is allowed one guess.
If the guess is correct – the person guessed joins that “team” becoming part of their “empire”. As people form teams, all of them can confer before making another guess.
If the guess is incorrect – the turn passes to the person incorrectly guessed who now guesses at the identify of someone else in the room.
Winning:
The team who wins is the team who eventually guesses everyone in the room and has never been correctly guessed themselves.
Mafia
Mafia is a really simple game that actually needs more explanation. We explain in much more detail how to play mafia on this page: How to play mafia and include there a free mafia download pack ready to print and play!
Download
Free Mafia Print and Play Kit
Contains 6 sheets of cards to print back to back (or 3 sheets single sided with blank backs) and a set of instructions.
Who’s in the Bowl
How to play Who’s in the Bowl
Who’s in the bowl is very similar to the game above at the start, however instead of just one name, each person is given 5 or 6 small slips of paper and onto each slip they have to write the name of a famous person or character.
Once all the names have been written down they should fold their pieces of paper up and place each one into a bowl.
Once all the names are in the bowl the group is divided into teams. We usually play with two teams.
One of the team members is chosen to go first. Their job is to try to get their team mates to say the person on the slip of paper they take out of the bowl without mentioning their exact name. They are not permitted to spell the name, or provide initials.
They have exactly 1 minute to guess as many names as possible. The slips of paper are removed from the bowl once guessed. No passing is allowed. If the timer runs out and the team hasn’t guessed the name, that name is put back into the bowl.
Play then passes to the opposite team.
Play continues until all names have been guessed, and final scores are then counted up.
Winning:
The winning team is the one who guesses the most names once all names have been guessed.
Spy
How to play Spy
Spy is a game that needs a little time to set up. You have to know exactly how many people will be playing before setting the game up.
The moderator is selected and their job is to identify a “place” and write down a series of job roles that might be found in that place.
e.g. if the place is school the job roles could be, child, teacher, caretaker, headmaster, dinner lady, deputy headmaster, janitor.
Each slip of paper will contain the “place” and the “job”. ONE slip of paper contains the word “Spy”.
Once all slips of paper have been created, the moderator gets the group to select a piece of paper each. They should not show anyone else the words on their paper.
Aim of the game:
The game can either be won by the spy, or by those with job roles.
Job role people: must identify the spy.
Spy: must identify the location.
How the game is played:
Once everyone has their slip of paper, they must ask each other questions. The questions should not give away the place to the spy, but also provide enough information to the questioner that they can determine if someone knows where they are or not. Anyone can ask a question at any time, but we usually get the group to ask a question once they have been asked a question and the moderator usually selects someone to start.
As it takes a while to set up by the moderator, we usually set this up while playing another game.
You can download a couple of pre-written spy games for up to 20 people here which you can then cut up and use on the day.