Youth Group Games – Treasure Hunt

Remember when you were a child and you would play pirates? Remember how much fun it was looking for treasure? Why not plan a Treasure Hunt for your teens? Make the treasure something teens would like (a CD, a gift card to Walmart, a coupon book from McDonalds, etc.)

TREASURE HUNT:

A Treasure Hunt is fun for all ages.The more active the Treasure Hunt the better teens respond.

1. Hide the treasure. Find a place that they would never think to look (this leaves out any place that has food). If it’s a CD they are looking for, think of safe places where the CD won’t be damaged in the process of the hunt or while waiting to be found (you probably should not hide it on top of the refrigerator where the heat could damage the CD).

2. Write clues on Index cards. Riddles work well for teens. If you can make your clues hidden in Bible verses, it’s a great way to help your teens get familiar with their Bibles. An example would be if you hide an index card behind a map of under a globe, the verse could be John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world…” Leaving off at “world” is the clue. Place an index card in a garden and write a line of rhyme about the Garden of Eden like “Roses are red, violets are blue, if you plant here, you can grow too.”

3. Have the teens read the clues from the index cards and figure out where the next clue(index card) is. Let them continue until they find the treasure.

4. Once the treasure is found, celebrate with food (pizza or ice-cream sundeas work great).

5. For a twist on this, make the treasure verses in the Bible. You can call out  a Bible verse, and the first teen to stand and read it out loud wins a point. At the end of the hunt, the teen with the most points wins a prize. A variation of this would be giving them a list of ten clues. Each clue leads to a certain Bible verse. They write the verse they believe to be the right verse beside the clue. At the end, the person with the most right verses wins something (this can be as simple as they get to be the first to go throught the pizza line or again a CD or gift card).

* The most important thing to remember is make it fun and active. The more active the hunt the more likely your teens will be to invite a friend to come next time. Using the Bible is a really great way to get teens searching their Bible.

Tags: Bible, Bible Study, Chapters and verses of the Bible, Christianity, Religion and Spirituality