Play Comet's Coming

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. There's also more guidance to help you carry out your risk assessment, including examples. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough helpers for each team to have one. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers.

Learning the actions

1. Gather everyone in a circle.
2. Tell everyone that you’re going to play a warm-up called Comet’s coming.
3. One member of the group is the Astronaut. This person will call out the actions. It could be a young member, young leader or adult volunteer.
4. Everyone else should stand in the centre of the space, ready to respond to the commands with the appropriate action.
5. Everyone should practice the Astronaut’s commands. You could choose a selection from or all the following:

• Mars: run to the left of the space
• Neptune: run to the right of the space
• Comet’s coming: crouch down and get into ball
• Climb the spaceship: reach up and pretend to climb up a spaceship’s ladder
• Alien: make a silly face and put your hands on side of head, like antennae
• Moonwalk: pretend to slowly moonwalk around the room, taking big steps
• Rockets: use your arms to make a triangle above head
• Fix the spaceship: kneel and pretend to hammer
• Astronaut: pretend to float around the room, like you’re in space
• The Sun: freeze, rub your hands together and keep warm
• Star: stand still and put your arms out to the sides, like a shining star
• Blast off: flap your arms and walk around, like a rocket setting off

6. An adult volunteer or young leader could do the actions as they’re shouted out for people to copy. You may want to have a written out or printed copy of the actions.
7. You could start to get faster to make it harder and play it so the last person to do the action is out. 
8. Alternatively, if you want to people to become out as you play the game, you could add in these actions:

• Galaxy then (5,4,6,2,3): Players must get into a group of that number of people as quickly as possible and pretend to be stars. Anyone not in a group or with a lower number in their group could be out.
• Saturn: Everyone should get into pairs and one person should hug the other player, so their arms are like Saturn’s rings.
• Watch out, asteroid: Everyone should run back a chosen base. The last player to the base is out. You could use a hoop, or mark a base on the floor with masking tape, chalk or similar.

Playing the game

1. Once everyone knows the commands, play the game.
2. You could have a practice round. Read out each action one by one and give people a bit more time to remember the action.
3. You could also add in more actions as you go to make the game harder.
4. The person left at the end of the game’s the winner.
5. The winner could then become the caller if you play again.