Okay, I have to admit, this wasn't my idea, but it quickly became my brainchild. I was told that there was a life-sized Clue game that had been planned a while ago, but it didn't have any direction yet. I figured it would be an easy, generic bit of larger-than-life gaming.
Then I got bored.
Less than two weeks before the event, I brought up some brainstorming ideas to my YABers (the teens in the Youth Advisory Board) - we could do traditional, or we could do it as if in the library, or we could do some sort of parody. When I suggested that they take the role of the suspects - and thus tokens - they quickly decided they wanted to do the literary world. We round-robined, had a lot of ideas, and ended with six series: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Warm Bodies, X-Men, Percy Jackson, and Hunger Games. We round-robined again to take a weapon from each series, which netted us a wand, Sting, a zombie limb, charged cards, Medusa's head, and a bow and arrow set.
Their homework was to give me locations and six of them were charged with coming up with characters. Some chose characters from the series (Ron Weasley, Aragorn, and Katniss) but also made up their own color-coded names ("Counselor Orange," "Death Frost," and "Mutant Midnight"). There was some shifting of characters and people, but what matters is that in the end we had enough tokens and I had some prop help.
Then I got even more bored.
I designed a board. I did the locations (one from each, plus two from Percy and Harry Potter to make the secret passage rooms connection between same-universe areas). Then I made cards. Then I made a brand new case. Flyers went up in the children's room with a note from one Miriam Quill, a mystic librarian. She was gifted with a golden quill that brought stories to life (the six tales chosen above) - but one of the characters didn't want to return to the book, and destroyed her quill, trapping her in the storeroom of her magical library. She pleaded with children to find out who destroyed it, and to find out with what and where so her assistant could reverse the damage and free her.
Sign ups doubled after that flyer went out.
Day of, there was a lot of math, lines, and masking tape to make a board that was 25 squares by 15. The rooms were taped out, each tile in the hallways were taped out, doors were placed, each room labeled. Props for each weapon were scattered, and six of my YABers donned costumes and immersed themselves in the roles of their characters. I played the frantic library assistant aiding the children in solving the mystery.
I was expecting a turn-out of about ten, maybe. The day after the flyer, I checked sign-ups. Seventeen. We had twenty by day-of (maybe I should have put the flyer out more than two days before the game). Siblings came. Parents actually stayed to watch instead of wandering the library. All told, including my volunteer YABers, we had an attendance of fifty-two.
That number still astounds me. What astounds me more is that we kept the attention of twenty kids, mostly eight to twelve year-olds. And we kept the attention of their parents, who sat and watched it all unfold.
I am so proud of my YABers. I didn't get to give them much direction ahead of time, and they performed with the tips I was able to give them brilliantly. They put up with a lot from the kids, some more than others, and we kept attention for two hours. I'm a little proud of myself, too, I don't usually have so much control over something and have it actually be so successful. I rarely leave the assistant role - to take charge and to actually do it well was a great way to end the year. Bon temps!
