The Turkey Chase 2014

We had a blast last Sunday night with our digital scavenger hunt.  It was hi-tech, loads of fun, relationship building, team building, and just plain awesome.  Best part is this is an event you can do and it will cost your budget absolutely nothing, zero, zip, free!


Goose Chase is a free app and web based game.  You create an account, name your game, give it a password, set up the game with time limits etc., load in the "missions" and then have fun together,

Mission:  Piggyback ride from a stranger

 Each team has one person download the app to their smart phone.  Then you travel around fulfilling the missions.  When your team takes a pic it is uploaded to the game and you can see all the teams scores and pics in real time.  Super cool!

We had 6 teams and it went great.  A few things I learned to share with you:

• Create way more missions than you think they can accomplish in the time frame.  I thought I did and it still wasn't enough.  
• Pull together some creative minds to help you come up with "missions".  Goose Chase has some prefab missions to choose from as well.
• Remind your drivers that they are not on the team and are simply there to move the teams around to accomplish their missions.  Let the students figure out which missions to do and in what order.  I'll just say this because I know some out there would allow students to drive, ONLY ADULT DRIVERS (unless you like lawsuits and angry parents)
• Remind the teams that you are the judge and have the ultimate say on who wins.  Believe it or not some teams won't follow the mission directions, some on purpose.  Cheaters!
• End the game at a location and pull everyone together and reward the winners.  We ended at McD's and bought the winning team their food.

We chose to do this event on the weekend after Thanksgiving knowing many students would be out of town and this would be a fun break from the usual youth group gathering.  The bonus is we had 3 guests and are hoping that they will return since they saw that church and youth group participation can be fun.

Mission:  Picture with a pirate

You will have some students who choose not to participate because they will think "it's not my thing" or "my friend isn't going" or "this isn't spiritual enough for me".  Hopefully over time they will learn that fellowship is important to a believer's spiritual health and they missed out on an awesome team building event.

We will follow up this Sunday night by showing all the pics during our Hang Time up on the big screen.  The ones who participated will enjoy seeing all their pics and hopefully the ones who didn't participate will get to see the fun they missed.



Mission: Dancing with a Pastor