INTRODUCTION
Dear boys and girls, get around and don’t forget your parents! I’ll tell you a story about exciting quests. Creating an amazing adventure for a birthday party is becoming a smash hit today. We are always happy to organize a quest for kids, but at the same time we understand, that earning on their happiness is not our way of doing business. Therefore, we found a way out. Parents can prepare quests for kids by themselves. We will give you a set of hints for making it simple, fast and budget-friendly.
A quest can be based on a well-known story. In this case all challenges and costumes shall be inspired by a movie, a book or a video game. On the other hand, it can be simply made up of various tasks with “the first team wins” principle. It is common practice, that children do not pay much attention to decorations, but rather get fully involved into tackling challenges.
We offer a set of tasks, which you can compile into a great quest. You only need to integrate them into the general concept of the adventure. Participants can act in teams of 4-5 members or as a single group.
QUEST FEATURES
- Location : backyard, outdoors, park
- Max. people : 30
- Team : 4-6 people
- Time : 2 hours
- Budget : 100$ - 300$
CHALLENGE NO. 1. LABYRINTH
It’s an old but exciting and emotional teambuilding task. One of the players gets blindfolded and lead to a start of a labyrinth, which is lined by ropes on the ground or drawn with chalk on pavement. The rest of the team shall lead the poor blindfolded player so that he doesn’t leave the labyrinth borders. Stepping on the border is not allowed. Any mistake results in repeating the task from the very beginning.
While driving the player through the labyrinth each team member can say only one word in a turn. If the guides say two words or miss their turn, the blindfolded player starts all over again. Therefore kind soon start saying in the following manner – Go, Stop, Turn, Go, etc.
CHALLENGE NO. 2. SPIDER WEB
You will need a long rope, a padlock and a key for this challenge. If there are several teams, then you’ll need a padlock and a key for each team. Randomly pass the rope around some construction or several trees like a spider web. Fix the padlock on one end of the rope and the key – on the other end. Fasten the key and the lock to a big ring, so that they can be easily moved along the rope. The challenge is to open the lock. One group begins to pull the padlock to the center and the other one pulls the key. Somewhere in the middle of the way the groups will meet and open the padlock.
If you don’t have a padlock, simply hang letters along the spider web. Kids will combine a word or a phrase while following the route. To complicate the task you can arrange the letters randomly to create an anagram.
CHALLENGE NO. 3. ROPE-WALKER
This is a skill-oriented challenge. Players don’t need to think. They only need to walk along the ropes there and back while keeping balance. For this task you will need several regular ratchet straps for securing loads. They are available in any department store or fuel station. If you strain them powerfully, they can hold several adults as well.
The task becomes even more exciting if you hang some item in the end of the route. Players have to reach this item and bring it back to the starting point. And don’t forget – all the surface beneath is burning lava.
CHALLENGE NO. 4. COCKTAIL
You will need several bottles and 3 varieties of syrups for this challenge. Pour a spoonful of syrup into each bottle and add water. Shake well and ask players to guess all the three ingredients. Give one point for each correct guess. Do not mix similar tastes. Take, for example, chocolate, mint and lemon. If you are making a pirate quest name this cocktail "Red Beard".
You can use 3 different juices instead of syrups. In winter it’s great to make tea with different spices (which have to be guessed). Prepare individual bottles for each team or pour the mix to separate plastic glasses from a large can.
CHALLENGE NO. 5. FOOTGOLF
It’s time for the kids to warm up a little bit. Let’s ask them to play a mix of golf and football. Dig a hole sized as a football in any suitable place. Optionally, insert a bucket and a flag inside to make it look like a golf hole. Position the players 150-200 meters away from the hole, draw a line and suggest to drive the ball into the hole in 5 shots. Players must take turns while hitting the ball. Playing in the forest adds more fun, because the ball always hits trees. And playing in the parking lot makes it even more exciting ))
CHALLENGE NO. 6. TREASURES FROM THE CHEST
Kids love to search for treasures and we will meet their expectations. Of course we could find small chests with precious coins and write a password on one of them, but keeping in mind our budget matters we will change chests to lunchboxes and coins to pieces of pasta (with holes inside). You can hide papers with messages in these pasta pieces. Kids will enthusiastically crack those searching for a code.
By the way, if you need golden nuggets for decoration, simply buy golden spray paint for wheel rims and paint rock chips or stones. Then just encipher the treasure location with GPS coordinates or mark it with a cross on a printed Google map and you are ready to go!
CHALLENGE NO. 7. CELLS
One more teambuilding task. Pass a rope round two trees to get two rows of cells. Each cell should be approx. 30 x 50 cm. The team has to move each player through the cells, so that the player does not touch the ground. Each cell can be used only once.
CHALLENGE NO. 8. SHOOTING RANGE
There is nothing boys enjoy better than shooting. Shooting challenges always arouse interest among kids and no quest can do without one. If you do not want to militarize the game, just use tennis balls to throw them into buckets. Add interest by throwing balls into target over a high fence with other players correcting their fire. If you play with teenagers teach them to make slingshots or use a couple of pneumatic rifles. Please remember – never allow children to shoot animals.
CHALLENGE NO. 9. BLACK WATER
There is a great variety of exciting chemical experiments for quests. Making black water clear again is one of the most simple. To make black water you will need a bottle of water, a pinch of starch and several drops of iodine. Just mix them together. If you don’t use the mix for a while, starch will deposit on the bottom. In this case, shake the bottle to make it black again. Players can decolorize black water with an ampule of sodium thiosulfate (available in any drug store). Such reaction lasts for 1-2 minutes. You can create different scenarios for this challenge in the quest. One of the options is to buy different ampules (with glucose or normal saline), paint them with different colors or write different words. The task is to guess the right ampule (with sodium thiosulfate) and to use it.
CHALLENGE NO. 10. MEMORY TEST
Visual memory development is very good for children, so such types of challenges are a great idea for any quest. You will need a lined piece of board and a dozen of various items. Allow 1-2 minutes for kids to memorize location of each item on the board, remove them and let kids place all the items into their previous places. Simple and exciting.
In a perfect world, you need two sets of items and two boards. Arrange all the items on one of the boards and cover it with a piece of cloth. Another board stays empty with the items nearby. Remove the cloth for 10-15 seconds during the quest and let players memorize the items’ locations. After that, kids have to reproduce the order on the second board.
CHALLENGE NO.11. UNDERGROUND WORD
If you have an opportunity to buy or rent small sized metal finders, you can create many exciting challenges with them – even treasure hunting championships! Simply hide different coins in a field and let kids search for them. However, we suggest something else. Carefully tramp metal chains into the ground in the form of large letters. With the help of metal finders players have to identify the letters and guess the word. Three or four large and recognizable letters would be enough (for example – GOAL).
For a treasure hunting championship we recommend to use metal plates or lids, rather than coins. Large items are easier to find even with a basic metal finder and can be simply dug out. You can also bury a chest and cover it with a metal plate (put some soil and grass on top). Players need to find the plate with a metal finder first, and then search for the treasure chest underneath it.
CHALLENGE NO. 12. A TREASURE FROM DAVY JONES’S LOCKER
This task will require powerful magnets, which can be extracted from old loudspeakers or computer hard disk drives. Of course, the best option is to buy special search magnets with holes for a rope. The most ordinary ones cost about 20$-30$. Extracting coins from water with these magnets is very exciting. Simply throw coins into the water on a lakeshore, pond, pool or under a bridge over a shallow river. Don’t forget to check if the coins stick to the magnets easily.
You can use large nuts or bolts instead of coins. Allow several minutes for the kids to catch treasures from the bottom and count them. Don’t forget to take a screwdriver or pliers with you – detaching coins from a powerful magnet is not that easy. It is recommended to detach coins with the help of adults.
CHALLENGE NO. 13. SEARCH FOR WORDS
A very simple task to prepare. Hide various words in some search zone – on children’s playground, a room, over a staircase, in a car, etc. Searching for hidden clues is interesting by itself, but you can add some more challenge. All found words can be taken from a popular song or movie, which kids have to guess. In this case, they don’t need to look for all the clues – “thinkers” will soon figure out the correct answer, and the rest will increase their chances by active searching.
Write the words on adhesive labels and remove them after the quest. If the search zone is located on your private property – use permanent marker. In a forest, use wooden plates or pieces of paper. Attach them to poles or trees with small nails or sealing tape. Warn the players that removing stickers or plates is strictly prohibited. Kids can write down the located words into notepads or make a picture with a smartphone.
CHALLENGE NO. 14. PHOTO HUNTING
Let’s try to activate our players’ creative powers. Today all the kids have smartphones, which they can use to make pictures during the quest. Suggest them to make some funny posed pictures. They can jump and “hang in the air”, make pictures of birds and animals, throw items into the air, climb trees or just make silly faces. Three different pictures would be enough for any quest.
If taking pictures seems too simple, you can complicate the task a little bit. Give the players a long word - for example: METEOROLOGIST - and ask to create words using letters from this word. Afterwards they need to find and take a picture of this word. The longer is the word, the more points players get. Players, who find and photograph "STEEL" or "MOIST", get 5 points. Who get "ROOM”, “LOGO” or “TIRE” - 4 points. A picture of a “TOE” brings 3 points.
CHALLENGE NO. 15. FINAL ROUND
It would be great to finish the quest by a cheerful activity with all the players. For example, all the participants write their wishes on a large balloon and the winner lets it fly into the sky. You may also suggest the players to find necessary pages, lines and words in a book and compose a phrase, which will become a motto of the whole quest – “Let’s be friends forever and cross a road only at crosswalks” or "Happy birthday, Joe!"
You can also hide a final treasure chest, containing a birthday cake or defeat a dreadful monster who loses tickets to cinema or quest-room as he runs away, but this will be quite a different story.
Thank you for attention, if you have questions write to the author :
Evgeny Shaposhnikov, es@en.cx , telegram @airevgeny
