Counselor Hunt
Thanks very much to my best friend, Vicky Wallace, who introduced me to this game up at Camp Woolsey. I believe she learned it for the first time while she was working at the Lochearn Camp for Girls in Vermont.
This is basically reverse hide-and-go-seek, and is best played at a large event where you have a lot of leaders (or older girls). Gather all the campers gather in one spot and split them into several teams (we use different colours of face paint to identify the teams). Have the girls close their eyes and count to 100 slowly. During this time, all the counselors (except one or two to supervise the game) take off and hide somewhere in the playing area. Try to make the hiding spots creative and suitable to the group of leaders and girls you're working with, i.e., if you're hiding from Sparks, don't make it as difficult as when you're hiding from Pathfinders.
Once the girls have reached the 100-count, the spread out in pairs and try to find the counselors. "Captured" counselors are escorted back to the meeting area by the campers who caught them and are marked as belonging to that team. Once all the counselors have been found, each team of girls gathers around their captured counselors.
The leader running the game then announces challenges that the teams must compete in. For each challenge, the girls must choose from their arsenal of captured counselors the person who is the "best fit" for the challenge. Teams are awarded points based on how well their counselors perform in the challenge. We play with an additional rule that each counselor can only be used twice, in order to prevent the over-utilization (victimization?) of favorite leaders.
Feel free to create your own challenges for this game. Below I have listed a number of the challenges that we use at Woolsey.
Unsurprisingly, this game is a HUGE hit with our campers!
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