Four On A Couch

Last night at youth group we played one of my top five youth group games: Four on a Couch. It's a dreadful name game because everyone in the circle has a new name, but it's loads of fun, and a good way to spend some time as a group. The concept of the game is simple. Each person writes their name on a slip of paper, puts it into a hat and draws a new secret name to be played with during the game. Then the group divides into two and sits in a circle of chairs, identifying four of those chairs as a couch by pushing them together. Teams sit every other person and leave one extra chair in the circle. The game is played by allowing the person sitting next to the open chair to call a name from someone in the group. Whoever drew that name moves across the circle to the empty chair, leaving a new empty chair ready for the next person to be called. And though it seems simple, the object of the game is to get 4 people of your team onto the couch and it's more difficult than it appears.

It works best if you have an even number of boys and girls, but as that is rarely the case, doling out hats works as well. Last night we asked one team to remove shoes and played a game of socks versus shoes. It's fun to play with an actual couch, but because we have a few students with disabilities the chairs meant that wheelchairs could be used all around the circle. We try to make all of our games and activities inclusive this way, with varying degrees of success, but this game was very inclusive and everyone could participate fully! Yay!

The easy way to play the game is detailed above, but if you're up for a challenge, or you've played the game once or twice, you can ramp up the difficulty by adding the following rule: every time you sit down, you exchange names with the person on your right. That ensures lots of confusion and even the smartest kids in the group have a hard time remembering who has who's name.

We followed the game with a great discussion about names and how they shape our identity. Then we read a passage from John 1 and talked further about the names that we call God, what they really mean, and the way that God changes our name (as he did with Peter).

This was a pretty classic youth group evening for our group. It came on the heels of the 30 hour famine (Friday/Saturday), so I wasn't sure how our attendance would look. Personally, I was still exhausted from the famine and the extra energy it took to plan the event, so I needed something that was a little easier to plan and the couch game, name conversation is just about the easiest that it can get for me.

Yesterday we also experimented with a new event called Parent's Night at Confirmation. No students, just parents going through a sample confirmation evening. It was a mild success. The attendance was a little lower than expected, though we managed to make it just as chaotic as a normal evening of confirmation :) I think we'll have better response at the beginning of the school year next year and I'm looking forward to making it better!