Almost a tradition, in the annual family gathering I set up
a gymkhana for the young ones. In the past I went for “move pingpong balls from
A to B using spoons” and such
This year I decided to change the concept a little bit, using
World of Warcraft as a reference. I created 21 quests, and organized the kids
into teams competing for being the first one to complete 7
These were the rules:
- 3 teams of 3-4 members on each. The 3 elder kids would pick their components by turns
- Each team randomly chooses 3 from the 21 envelopes containing the quest briefings
- Quests will commonly involve locating little pieces of paper hidden on certain house areas. The briefing will specify how many, generally with humorous texts
- There were some other challenges such as find out who was the oldest of the family elders, find out the name of the movie whose soundtrack is playing, etc
- I commonly hid 1 more objective paper than the mission required. In other words, if the objective was to find 4 papers in the house showers, I would place 5 of them to ensure they could not get stuck
- It’s up to the teams if they want to work on the missions simultaneously or focus on them one by one
- Every 10 min of playtime they could change 1 mission for another from the pool, in case they got stuck
- The game will end in an hour no matter what
From a design point of view, the victors were the only team
that worked in 2 missions in parallel. The girls seemed to be more efficient
and less complainy than boys but they all requested help at some point. It took
approximately 7 hours from me to create the gymkhana, from brainstorming to
write the texts on little pieces of paper, and then hide them all around my
parent’s house
Overall I think the kids had a great time. The parents told
me they expect the event with a lot of anticipation and talk about it for days.
Still, it took too much time from me and not sure if I’ll be willing to do it
next year
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