SHAAN'S THEORY OF WIDE GAMES

It's pretty easy to make up wide game based on whatever theme you have (depending on your imagination). There are several basic categories of wide game and you just make up a surrounding story that fits in with your theme.

1. The "go out and find the pictures memory" wide game.
Basically you stick a load of pictures round your grounds of "things" that have names. The girls have to go out, find as many as they can, then come back and write them down. For example, for the Under the Sea theme put out 12 "sea" pictures such as "Winnie the Whale", "Sidney the Sealion" etc. Give the girls 3 chances to come back and write down the names so they don't have to remember 12 all at once. For Alice in Wonderland you could put out pictures of the characters or something. Or maybe you could put out 12 different playing cards and they have to find which ones they are.

2. The "go out and find bits of a jigsaw which them asks you to do something" wide game:
The clue is in the name. On a large bit of card (maybe one for each group) write some words telling the group what they have to do next (such as a scavenger hunt, or instructions to do something). Chop into a set number of pieces. Girls have to go out and find all the pieces of card in their team's colour, make up the jigsaw and then follow the instructions. E.g for HP theme holiday all the owls are sick ;) There is an ancient potion recipe that could save them, only an evil dark wizard has ripped up the instructions and thown them round the garden (ok so stories are not my strong point!) The girls have to go and find the pieces of instructions, put them together and they
then find that it gives them the potion ingredients which they then have to go and find (things like "a brown" leaf, "a long piece of grass" etc).

For Alice in Wonderland the instuctions could be a recipe for Mock Turtle soup (scavenger hunt) or something like an invitation to the Mad Hatter's tea party for which the girl's need to make a "silly" hat.

3. The "go round several bases and do a challenge to collect something" wide game
There are several points which the girls have to go round. At each point they complete a themed
challenge. Successful completion of the challenge results in the girls getting "something". When they've collected all the somethings they can do "something else" with them! E.g Spies theme. We actually ran this over the whole weekend. There was a map (of 16 squares) on the wall. Girls had to work out where the evil spy was hiding. (there was more to the story than that but I'll save you the
long version). They had to do a number of challenges: crack a code, reveal invisible writing, find the message hidden in the paper, follow compass points. After completing each challenge they got a clue to the location of the spy. When they had all the clues they could work out where the spy was hidden.

Example 2 : Rabbits (from Wide games book) (actually you could use this for Alice in Wonderland. ) Girls have to complete rabbit related challenges (such as bunny hops, eating a carrot, making a lettuce). After completing each challenge they get a piece of rabbit. At the end they made a finished rabbit.

Example 3 : The challenges are all Guide skills (such as knot tying, fire lighting etc)

4. The "beat the other team" wide game
Many versions of this. From simple tag games to flashing people with spotlights (as a night game) to
having to carry tokens that mean things to ...

I'd also recommend the following sites for getting ideas:

http://www.funandgames.org/widegames.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Valley/5170/widegames.html (Lyse's site)
http://www.scoutscan.com/games/widegame.html
http://geocities.com/dpechey/games.htm (Doreen's site)

and of course our own BOGUK :)