Ultimate Charades Death Match

One of the great parts of my job is doing ministry with college students. Wednesday nights always feature some sort of crazy activity and tonight was no different. It's always a challenge to balance more sedate activities with more energetic options . We try to balance more active games with less active games over the stretch of a month. Tonight we decided to combine the two options. Ultimate Charades Death Match is what you get when dodgeball and charades combine into one wacky game.

I'd say that it was a great success. I'm now on a mission to determine how many more "normal" games can be made much more exciting by incorporating the ultimate death match format. I'm pretty sure some dodgeballs will make most any game more interesting.

Ultimate Charades Death Match Rules

What you'll need:

  • Normal charades topics (movies, music, books, tv). We split them into difficult (two points) and easy (one point).
  • Dodgeballs. Tonight we played with two, next time we'll go to at least four, probably six.

How to play: 

Split the players into teams. Set acting boundaries (we used the key of our gym basketball court). The actor may move freely within these boundaries (for dodging purposes). Set player boundaries (our teams were split around the three-point circle). The first "actor" from each team gets to Rock-Paper-Scissors to see which team acts first. The team that is acting/guessing plays charades in normal fashion. 

Scoring: The acting/guessing team scores points by correctly guessing the title. The stealing team gains points by using the dodgeballs to steal the round.The actor should continue acting/dodging until the round is over.

Stealing occurs when the stealing team manages to hit the actor with a dodgeball and correctly guess the title. If the actor dodges a throw the stealing team must retrieve the ball and can try again. The stealing team only gets one chance to guess and the guess must be made by the person who made the throw. If the stealing team guesses wrong the actor's team wins the round. 

The round ends when the actor's team has successfully guessed the title or the stealing team has made a guess and either stolen the points or failed to steal. There is no round time limit. The stealing team can make a judgment call to end the misery by guessing incorrectly and granting the actor's team the round. The actor's team can hit their own actor with a dodgeball to forfeit the round if the acting is too painful.

Play until all of the topics have been used or people grow weary of the game. We went through about 70 topics in 90 minutes.