Man-a hunt
You’ll need
- Stopwatch or phone
- Scrap paper
- Pens or pencils
- Coloured ribbon or strips of fabric
- Mops or brooms
- Buckets
- Cones or other markers
Before you begin
- This is an outdoor group game and works best in a large space with some places to hide from the other teams.
- Decide how you’ll make the bases. You could use trees – if there aren’t enough trees in the area you’re playing in, you could make a base using a mop or brush in a weighted bucket.
- Decide what you’ll use for tails. You could use scraps of coloured fabric or coloured ribbon, or get people to gently tag each other instead.
- Remind all the adults that they’re helping to manage the game – it’s the young people playing it. This will make sure that the adults avoid inappropriate contact in a physical game.
Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game. You take on the role of a planeswalker, who collects magic energy (called mana) from the land around you. You use that mana to summon creatures and cast spells during the game. There are five different colours of Magic cards; each colour handles things differently, so you can choose what kind of planeswalker you want to be. Your deck of cards represents all the spells you know and the creatures you can summon.
Find out more on the official Magic website.
Magic players craft their own decks and choose cards that suit their own playing styles and strategies. When they’re building a deck, people often focus on taking advantage of the different powers in each of Magic’s five mana colours:
- White magic focuses on teamwork by using massive armies and sinking their abilities to protect both the controlling player and their creatures. White cards generally include spells like protection, balance and peacemakers.
- Blue magic allows a Planeswalker to preview cards in their library, banish opponents from the battlefield and even manipulate time. Blue cards can include counter spells, banishments, and control cards.
- Black magic is centred on the quest for power by any means possible. Black cards can include invasive creatures, discard spells and the ability to bring a card back from the graveyard, or prevent them from going there.
- Red magic uses direct damage to opponents, quick acting spells and cool creatures like dragons. Red cards include fast creatures, power builders, and destruction spells.
- Green magic combines the healing power of nature with the ferocity of the animal kingdom. Green spells include trampling creatures, life gaining spells and mana generation.
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Play the game
- Everyone should split into five teams. Each team should choose a different colour: red, blue, green, black, or white.
You could check out the information about the colours of Magic and share some more information about the different colours.
- Each team should find a space to be their base. They should set out a ring of cones around their base. Each team must stay outside the cones around their base for the rest of the game.
It’s up to you whether you use trees or bases you’ve made.
- The person leading the game should give everyone a tail that’s their team’s colour. Everyone should tuck their tail into their clothes. The tails should hang to about knee length and shouldn’t be tied to the players.
If you don’t have anything to act as tails, everyone could try using their Scout scarves or play by tagging each other. You’ll still need to use ribbons for each team to tie at the opposing teams’ bases.
- The person leading the game should stand somewhere visible in the middle of the space. They’ll act as the referee, so it’s important that they can see everything going on.
- The person leading the game should explain the rules below and start the game.
- Everyone should play until time runs out.
- The person leading the game should count up the points and everyone should congratulate the winning team.
- The aim of the game is for teams to catch other players and capture the other teams’ bases.
- To capture a base, the players need to get to it and tie their colour ribbon at the top of the base. If the base has already been captured, they can’t remove other teams’ ribbons – they can only move their team’s colour to the top.
- Players defending their own base must stay outside the ring of cones.
- To catch a player and get a point, the players need to pull someone’s tail out and take them to the referee. Once the point has been added, the caught player should get their tail back and run off again.
- Players can’t be caught if they’re taking someone they’ve caught to the referee.
- Players can only catch one player at a time.
- Players can’t catch a person and move their ribbon at the same time.
- At the end of the game, the team that has captured the most bases gets bonus points.
- If you’re playing with a hidden base, the team that finds and captures the hidden base gets bonus points too.
Team talk
- After the first round, everyone should gather in their teams and chat about how they found the game.
- Each team should think about what tactics they used, what went well, and how they could improve in the next round. Did they work well together? Did enough players defend the base? Did enough players try to capture other teams’ bases?
- The person leading the game should explain that in Magic: The Gathering, players choose cards that suit their own playing styles based on the five mana colours, like the five coloured teams in this game.
- Each team should check out the different Magic mana colours and choose a style to play.
- Everyone should play some more rounds of the game. They should chat with their team between each round and try to find out which of the mana colours and playing styles suits them best as a group.
- Everyone should keep playing until they run out of time.
Reflection
This game was all about working together and figuring out the best tactics to capture the other team’s bases. Ask everyone to have a quick chat in their groups at the end of the game. Did they notice anything change between the different rounds of the game? Was it useful to spend some time each round thinking about the different ways to approach the game and how they might work better together?
In Magic, you build your deck of cards based on the colours you like. All the different colours have different strengths and weaknesses, but no play style is better than the others – it’s all about personal preference! See whether teams preferred playing with an offensive or defensive strategy and if any teams chose the same strategies to win the game. Does anyone want to share some of their thoughts on which tactics were best?
Safety
All activities must be safely managed. You must complete a thorough risk assessment and take appropriate steps to reduce risk. Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Always get approval for the activity, and have suitable supervision and an InTouch process.
- Active games
The game area should be free of hazards. Explain the rules of the game clearly and have a clear way to communicate that the game must stop when needed. Take a look at our guidance on running active games safely.
- Set up an extra, hidden base you can use for bonus points. It works just like the other bases, except no one knows where it is.
- You could give some leaders a different colour of ribbon tails to play as part of the lost tribe. The lost tribe don’t have their own points. Catching members of the lost tribe gets players two points. If a player’s caught by a member of the lost tribe, their team loses a point when they reach the referee.
Make sure the area you choose to play in is accessible for the whole group. You could change the size of the playing area, the number of teams, or the time limit of the rounds.
All Scout activities should be inclusive and accessible.
Check out Magic: The Crafting to create your own mana tokens for the game, or Learn to play Magic for some info on how to get started playing Magic: The Gathering.