A Gander at Goosey Games

In part 4 of my goose blog I wrote about being the importance of play and games in a creative team — to lighten everything up, encourage out risk taking/out of the box thinking, and also help a team to bond!

So I figured I may as well share a handful of them in more detail incase you were interested. There were many more — I’ve just picked out my favourites. It’s worth noting that we opened this up to encourage each team mate to suggest a game to do if they had one and fancied leading it :) They did!

1. Pass the Narwal. You start a line of a made up story, you throw something to another member of the team, or just say their name (we had a toy Narwal, hence the name of the game). That team mate continues the next line of the story, and pass it on to another team mate. And it goes on like that until everyone has added to the story. The weirder the tale the better (obviously).
   Example: “One sunny day, in a garden of gnomes, everything goes terribly wrong… ATTACK…” Next person: “A cat pounces off the fence and bites the head off the lead gnome — Harold, making every other gnome transport into an alternate universe…” Next person: “ The group of gnomes land on an island which is full of clones of Harold, but the problem is, some Harolds are good, some Harolds are evil, and some Harolds can only walk backwards which is annoying”… and it continues.
2. Dingbats. How to describe Dingbats… hmm… it’s kind of like Catchphrase (which is only helpful if you’ve watched British day time TV). Basically you need to guess what phrases a set of words or pictures represent. Example below.

This is Dingbats

3. Create a new dinosaur. You had to make up a new dinosaur name, explain their attributes and give it a bit of a story. Eg The DribbloDroolasaurus — is of course a very round dinosaur, who’s mouth is always open so it uncontrollably dribbles and drools everywhere — thus making all other Dinosaurs slip in it’s puddle, therefore enabling it to be pretty high up on the predator list.

4. The Shape Game. Made up by my Dad and Uncle when they were kids. As leader of the game you draw random squiggles and pieces of paper — hand them over to each member of the team and they need to turn it into a drawing of something and then explain what it is.

Beautiful illustrations from the creative team at Wonderbly!

Simple, childish, fun! What else could you possibly ask for?