- Gauntlet in the Cedar Forest
- Risk – Two Teams
- Risk – Three Teams
- Gauntlet on Cabin Hill
- Skit Night
- Indoor Gauntlet
- Outdoor Skit Night
- Cups
- Cups with Water Sprayers
- Big Frizz
Your favourite primetime didn’t make the list? No worries! Just contact 1800 – PLAY – GAUNTLET in order to submit your feedback.
Ask your kids (or yourself, my camp-going friends) what games they played during their (your) week at camp. If my list proves correct, Gauntlet and/or Risk will be remembered, perhaps by another name (or no name at all, just “the game where we ran and got flags or ran and got sprayed or both got flags and got sprayed while running”). Campers love Gauntlet, and they love Risk. These are the two most memorable camp-wide games I have run in the past two years, and I think I’m starting to understand why.
First of all, kids love their counsellors. That’s a rule – if you do your job right, your kids will love you, no matter what. Furthermore, kids love playing games against their counsellors. Risk and Gauntlet both allow campers to engage in friendly competition against and alongside their staff members. Of course, all of our games are meant to nurture this friendly competitive spirit, but the two aforementioned are special.
Gauntlet’s goal is for campers to run past their counsellors in order to grab a blue cannister that is waiting at the other end, but the counsellors are armed with sprayers that, when their campers are sprayed, will send them back to the start to try again. This is one of the only games that pits all campers against all staff, with a few staff on the camper team for sportsmanship and leadership. It involves water, which is like injecting concentrated fun into a game. Lastly, it takes place exclusively in the Cedar Forest (except for when it doesn’t), and running through the trees is a rare, but welcome, opportunity for kids at camp.
Risk does not involve water, and only involves the forest with larger groups, however. It’s an adaptation of the classic board game, using capture-the-flag mechanics to capture territories. For anyone unfamiliar with the board game, the goal is for one team to expand their territory to all of the territories on the board, which at camp means campers can run across the entire site and feel the adrenaline of one of the most intense campwide games we can offer.
The rest of the list is a sample of other fun games – less memorable, for some campers, but still all of which hold a special place in my heart – that we offer during the week. There are also many others that don’t make the list, as well as small variations that every game faces in order to fit the theme of the week.
Primetime is my favourite part of the day. Was it yours?
