Categories

3.5 shiney stars

Everyone needs a piece of paper and pen for this one. 

Down the left hand side, write the following categories:

  • TV Show
  • Singer
  • Food
  • Animal
  • Colour
  • Place
  • Type of car
  • Sport
  • Famous person
  • etc

Read out a letter, and people have to quickly write down something that matches each category.  For example, the letter M

  • TV Show = Mash
  • Singer = Madonna
  • Food = Mashed Potatoes
  • Animal = Monkey
  • Colour = Mauve
  • Place = Melbourne
  • Type of car = Mitsubishi
  • Sport = Marbles
  • Famous person = Michael Jordan

Depending on the size / age / competitiveness of your group, you can either have people in teams and make it the first team to finish, or do it by individuals, etc.

 



Features
  • Free / Low Cost
  • Night
Objectives
  • Ice breaker
Space
  • Indoor
  • Large area
  • Small area
Age
  • Teens (Age 12-15)
  • Teens (Age 16-18)
  • Young Adults

Group Size
  • Small Groups (1-9 people)
  • Medium (10-29 people)
  • Large groups (30+)

Duration
  • Longer (30-60 mins)
  • Medium (11-29 mins)
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Comments

This is like Scattegories (a game I love!)
Just thought I'd add that an additional idea is to award 2 points for words that have the letter twice (for example- Mitsubishi Magna has 2 M's so it would be two points. If you did Marilyn Monroe for your famous person, that would be 2 points...) This does not count for words like "the", "a", "or", or "of"
- Halley (29 Nov 2008)

My class is a younger one. Instead of "singer" I did "something musical" and instead of "famous person" I added: Something from the Bible, and Someone from church
- Brandi (20 Jan 2010)

To make the game harder, you can choose a word (eg. 'great') instead of just one letter, and write it at the top of the page left to right; writing the categories down the left hand side you can then draw grid lines so that you have find a word in each category beginning with each letter ('g', 'r', 'e', 'a', 't'). give people a time limit to fill in the grid. at the end, if any person has the same answer as any other players, each player must cross it out and no points are awarded for that word.
- Maeve (30 Apr 2010)

How do you win.

- Phil (5 Oct 2012)

You award each word 10 points if no one else have the same word. If you match with someone else you get 5 points. You then add the points from left to right. When you play several games then you add the total of the last column and who has the highest points wins.

As a kid in Suriname I played it like this:
On a piece of paper you make 7 columns with the last column being the number column. The headings of each column were; girl names, boys names, animals, flowers, street names, and countries. The last column is where you put the number you have been awarded. Then one person says the alphabet quietly and someone else says "stop". Then at whatever letter the person saying the alphabet was at that time, all categories will start with that letter. Then you wait for everyone to be done writing then see what everyone has and who is matching with others all get 5 points for that word. If none are matching you get 10 points. To make it more competitive we change it to have the person that is done first to say stop and then nobody can write anymore and so you can earn more points at the end. At the end of the several rounds you add the numbers in the number column and who has the highest points win.

- haidy (21 Oct 2012)

nice just exactly what I'm looking for simple yet enjoyable thanks
- Jester (22 Dec 2015)

This game is just like Stop the bus. Many teenagers love playing this as it can become really competitive to see who can do it the quickest
- Kirsten (19 Mar 2018)

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