Games and Youth Ministry go together like peanut butter and jelly (unless you are allergic to the peanut butter.) YM360 is committed to helping youth workers who serve in the trenches of ministry every week. We know finding high-quality games at an affordable price is challenging. That is where an Annual Games for Youth Ministry Membership comes into play.
BECOME A G4YM MEMBER TODAY AND GET:
Name in a Box is exactly what it sounds like! You can enter as many names, prizes, challenges, verses, etc into the dashboard and a really long arm will randomly select one at a time from the box! It's painfully simple, but that's the point! It's a really easy way to pick a student for a game or to pick prizes.
Have you ever needed to pick a number for a game? Number Picker is what you need! Just set the range and Number Picker will pick a number at random! Do you need it to land on a specific number for cheating reasons? No problem! You can force it to land on any number you want on the fly!
One of Each is a fast-paced game that has students taking turns calling out items in a given category without repeating the same first letter. Each time an item is called out, you just enter its first letter on your keyboard and it’s taken off the board. If that letter is entered again, you’ll hear a buzz and that student is out!
Out of 10 gives best friends a chance to prove how well they know each other! One friend is blindfolded while the other can see the screen. A number will be chosen at random (ie 4 out of 10) and the friend who can see has to give the other examples of things they think they would give that rating. For example, if you have to get your friend to guess 8 out of 10 and you know they love sushi, you’d say something, “We’re getting sushi and there’s a 20 minute wait.” If they guess the correct rating, you get a point!
Pose This Way is a crowd favorite that doesn’t require any setup. The screen will flash 6 different poses (The Pray, The No Way, The Whey, The Oh Hey, The Hooray, and The Chipotle). Everyone has to stand up and make one of the poses where they’re standing. If the game stops on the pose that a student is doing, they have to sit down. Just keep eliminating students until there’s only one left!
Prize Boxes is a quick and simple way to give out prizes to the students in your youth group!. All you need to do is add pictures into the settings and the game will take care of the rest! You can have it randomly select a box, or you can have a student pick the one they want to open. What’s inside? You decide! You can add as many prizes as you’d like and the game will update the number of boxes on the screen!
The Prize Wheel is one of our favorite apps. It’s a great way to bring up the energy in the room. It takes very little setup and is always a winner. You can set up as many slots as you want. You can even set the size and color of the slot! The best part is, you can change the slots on the fly! If you need to change, "20 pushups" to be 80% of the wheel just before the spin it... you can do that!
Here’s why the normal way of using raffle tickets isn’t the best. When you give someone a raffle ticket, you tear off the bottom ticket and hand them the top one. At the end of the event, you reach into a hat filled with bottom tickets and pull one out. The problem is that not every bottom ticket makes it to the hat, especially if you have multiple volunteers handing out tickets. This app fixes that!
Who doesn't need a Red vs Blue scoreboard? This is the perfect way to keep score between opposing players, teams, or entire sections of the crowd. If you use any kind of "versus" game in your youth ministry, Red vs Blue is exactly what you need on screen. It requires no setup and just uses a few buttons to control the scores!
You’re not going to believe this, but Scoreboard is a scoreboard! We know, right? All joking aside, Scoreboard is an easy-to-use scoreboard with a timer and custom team names. Just hit the up/down arrow keys to add/ remove points. Use the top row of numbers to add/remove a batch of points! The clock can be set to whatever you want! If you want to keep track of team points, Scoreboard is the tool for you!
Scramble is your classic word game where the tiles are scrambled and students have to figure out the words/phrases on the screen. All you have to do is enter the words/phrases that you want to use in the dashboard and the game will take care of the rest! This is perfect for students' names, movie titles, or if you want to make it really difficult, Biblical genealogy!
Secret Squares is a blast! You select any images that you want and they’ll be covered by a bunch of squares. Your students have to figure out what the full image is as you reveal one square at a time! The first student to get it right will win that round! With the touch of a button, you can change the difficulty from just a handful of big squares to an insane amount of tiny squares!
Shake It Out is a blast! Just grab some contestants and have them shake ping pong balls out of tissue boxes that are strapped around their waists. The first person to shake out all of their ping pong balls before the clock runs out is the winner. The app has a customizable countdown clock with digital ping pong balls that fall when you hit letter keys on your keyboard.
Shifty Dot is a fantastic tool that can be used for a bunch of different games. We'll give you some ideas, but you can really do whatever you want with this one. The app is simple: Just pick the number of players and the screen with be filled with a group of boxes. A little white dot shifts around while it counts down. Watch the walk-through video below to get an idea of what you can do with this one.
Ships and Sailors is a classic youth ministry game that gets your students running around the room while they try to preform the actions on screen. For example, when the game lands on Starboard, everyone runs to the right side of the room. When it lands on Row, students have to get in groups of 4 and pretend to row the boat. Anyone slacking or not able to pair up for a task is OUT!
You can only move when it's night time! That's the number one rule of the game. Clear out your youth room and split the floor into four large sections with tape. Take four decks of cards and spread them out all over four sections. Challenge your students to find every card of one suit (Ace through King). You cannot move in a section that is daytime on the screen. If you do, you're out! The first student (or group) to collect all 13 cards of the same suit will win!
Song Bite is a new game that plays short snippets from songs that you upload. Students have to guess the name of the song and the band based on less than a second of audio. You control what songs you use, what part of the song that plays, and how long it plays for! Just grab a bunch of mp3s of your favorite songs and you’re in business!
Spinner is a fantastic tool that can be used for a bunch of different games. We'll give you some ideas, but you can really do whatever you want with this one. The app is simple: Just pick the number of players and the screen with be filled with a group of boxes. A little white dot shifts around while it counts down. Watch the walk-through video below to get an idea of what you can do with this one.
What happens when you mix frogger and minesweeper? You get some splodin frogs! Splodin Frogs is a youth group game that challenges your students to work together to get a frog through a pond scattered with bombs! The indicator on the left tells you how many lily pads have bombs underneath them, but it doesn’t tell you which ones they are. If you land on a bomb, your frog “splodes” and you’re sent back to the beginning.
The Stage Gauge is a great tool that makes your games way more fun! Imagine scoring a dance-off contest with a giant applause meter on the screen! Or create a head-to-head-to-head-to-head contest between freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Then use the Stage Gauge to show the winner! The possibilities are endless. You can set the color, size, and text of each section. To move the needle, simply hover your mouse over a colored rectangle in your dashboard. It's that easy! Check out the video below for a walk-through!
Stop It! is a fantastic, no setup youth group game that challenges students to hit a button and stop a clock as close as they can to a given number without going over. Whoever gets closest within 1/100th of a second is the winner! This is the kind of game that has everyone going nuts when the clock stops on the winning number. Tons of fun, easy to explain, and not setup required. Just stop it!
"Stop the Clock” has students trying to figure out how to stop the clock (hence the name). STC can be used in an escape room, during scavenger hunts, or on stage during your large group time. This STC is called, "Three Key" and requires students to find and plug three USB thumb drives into a USB hub to... Stop the Clock!
Stopwatch is... a stopwatch (hence the name). It works exactly how you'd expect it to work! You can start/stop the time and save that time in up to three slots. This is perfect for relay-type competitions (or pretty much anything that would benefit a stopwatch timer). This is a great tool for your next game!
You can play a lot of different games with Suits. At its very base, Suits is simply a game board that displays a bunch of boxes with different card suits. You can control how many boxes are on the screen, flip them, shuffle them, and even force them to be the suit that you want. So, give every student a playing card as they walk through the door. Then, use Suits to randomly pick a set of 8 suits. The first group of students who can form that set with their cards wins! That's just one of many games that you can play with Suits!
Sword Drill is your classic, “First to find this verse in their Bible” type of game. Just set it up by entering the verses that you want to use. The reference will appear on the screen and your students will have to rush to flip to it in their Bibles. The first to stand up with the verse ready to be read gets a point! This is a fun way to get your students into knowing where verses are in their Bibles.
Sword vs Shield is a “This or That” game that has your students battling it out between two rivals. Everyone needs to pose holding a sword or a shield. Then, two knights fly on to the screen in mid-battle. Just as the knight with the sword strikes the knight with the shield, the screen goes dark. Then, with the click of a button, the winner is revealed. The students making that pose win that round.
We have a mathematical equation to bring some light as to why running talent shows at youth group is a good idea. Fun + Easy = Awesome. Now that we have all that nerdy stuff out of the way, let’s talk about why we love using the Talent Show Buzzer. If you want your talent show to feel legit, then you need judges. If you have judges, then you need to give them the power to destroy the confidence of the contestants. That’s common sense. This resource does that.
Siri, predictive text, and virtual keyboards have spoiled this generation. Students don’t understand the struggle of texting before smartphones. Back in the day, we had to text to school in the snow, uphill both ways, like cave people. When it comes to old cell phones, the Nokia 3310 is the classic example of indestructible old tech. If you had a cellphone in the late 90s, it was the 3310. Text Me brings ’90s nostalgia to another level. We found an old Nokia manual and recreated the texting functionality for this app. Amaze your students with a glimpse into the past.
Have you ever needed to pick a thing? Maybe you’re playing a game and need a thing to be picked at random. Maybe that thing is a prize! Or maybe it’s a name! Whatever the thing, Thing Picker is what you need! Just type out a list of things and Thing Picker will do its thing! Things can be picked at random, but you can also force it to pick a certain thing. This thing is cool.
Quick! Name a Superhero! Name another! Another! ANOTHER!!! Three Spree is a fast-paced category game that has students naming off items in a category as fast as they can, without repeating anything or running out the three second clock. You make up the categories ahead of time, so they can be generic or specific to your youth ministry (like naming off volunteers).
True or false? Yey or nay? Fact or Fiction? Real or Fake? Thumbs is a great way to play all of those games with your students! At its core, Thumbs is a tool that displays a thumbs up and a thumbs down. Have everyone answer a question with their thumbs in the air. Then display the answer with the thumbs on the screen! It’s a great visual and adds some extra flare to your games.
Treasures is a fun, goofy game where you control the outcome. There are 5 treasure chests on the screen. Inside one is a bunch of coins. The others contain things like fish, rubber chickens, and poop. Give your students an opportunity to pick the correct chest. Little do they know, you’re pulling the strings and can decide which chest contains what on the fly.
Tug of War is a really quick and fun game that requires zero setup. Just have your students split into two teams (guys vs girls, upperclassmen vs underclassmen, etc). The louder they cheer, the stronger their pull on the rope will be! In reality, the person running the computer is controlling the rope with their cursor, but the students don’t need to know that!
"Unstand if..." is your classic, "Sit down if..." youth ministry game. The cool thing about this game is that you can quickly enter the conditions and start playing right away. Just have everyone stand up. If what's on the screen is true about them, have them unstand (aka sit down)! Since you can change the conditions in the dashboard, this is a great and simple game that can be played every week.
"What's in the Box!?" has a bunch of different uses. You can create up to 26 digital shoeboxes and assign a color, letter, and prize/anti-prize to each one. Then create a real life shoebox for each one on the screen. Have your students pick a letter and that shoebox will be revealed on the screen. When you hit the spacebar, the lid flies off and a little sign appears with what is in the box.
One way to play is to have a student blindfolded, sticking their hand into a shoebox filled with... whatever you want! This is fun because you can fill it with gross stuff and reveal to the crowd what it is without the blindfolded person knowing. You can even use it as prize picker!
What’s the Passcode is a game that has student trying to figure out a random 4- digit passcode with a series of clues that show up in the form of notifications. “The 3rd number is even”, “The 2nd number is three less than the 4th”, “The 1st number plus the 4th equals 5”, etc. The first student (or group) to correctly guess that passcode wins! Don’t worry, if they just aren’t getting it, you can force one of the notifications to straight up tell you one of the numbers.
Do you need a quick crowd game that doesn’t require any set up? Wink n Blink is perfect for that! The big face on the screen will close his eyes and so will all of your students. Then, he’ll open his left, right, or both eyes! Students will open their left, right, or both eyes in hopes that they match the screen. If they don’t, they’re out! It’s a great, quick crowd elimination game!
Word Shark is basically hangman, but underwater… with a shark. You enter your own words/phrases and the game will handle the rest. When a student guesses a letter, just hit that letter on the keyboard. If it’s correct, that letter will be revealed. If it’s wrong, one of three walls that separate the scuba diver and shark will lower. Once they get four wrong letters, the shark will attack… by launching a fireball from its mouth.
