Got no props? No problem.
When I look at my repertoire of group games and activities, team-building activities that don’t need any equipment probably make up about half of that list.
I’m going to share with you four of my all-time favourite team-building activities that don’t need any equipment.
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I think one of the most important, perhaps most valuable skills you can have as a group facilitator is to have a bunch of activities you can pull out of your back pocket in an instant.
Now, it may be that you’ve actually planned for a series of activities that don’t need any equipment, but I think it’s also useful to have that stash of no-prop activities up your sleeve for those unintended consequences.
For example, that time when I arrived at my destination and the airline lost my luggage, all of my props. Suddenly, my whole day was spent without any equipment whatsoever.
Or maybe the group is bigger than you anticipated and suddenly the equipment you’ve brought with you, there isn’t enough. Or maybe what you have got is broken or doesn’t work or can’t switch it on, whatever it is.
So either way, having a repertoire of activities that don’t need any equipment is useful, particularly when you’re looking at very important activities such as team-building experiences.
Below, I’m going to share one, two, three different team-building experiences that certainly fall within some of my favourites that don’t need any equipment at all.
And stick around to the end because I’m going to share with you one of the latest brand-new activities I’ve started playing, it needs no equipment and I don’t think I’ve found any group quite yet that has succeeded at it. It’s enormously fun, it triggers lots of laughter, and it’ll be well worth waiting for.
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In The Longest Shadow, you divide into small groups and each small group is given the same task.
That is to use the bright sun, more often done outside, but you could do the activity inside if you’ve got one bright single light, but to use the sun to cast the longest possible continuous shadow. So it means the group having to work together and aligning all of their shadows so that the shadow continues from some marker that you’ve placed on the ground as far along the ground or the floor as is possible. It’s great for inspiring creativity and you probably can imagine what that might look like just by the way I’ve described it, but like all of the experiences I share in these videos, you can go to Playmeo and more often than not see a video tutorial of a real group playing it as well.
Again, no props are required for this exercise. It’s a real team-building experience because they have to work collectively to solve this problem.
It’s called a train, but it starts by coupling people together. And the way you couple by, that is to find a way to put two people together, is to match the last letter or the first letter of someone’s name with the last letter or first letter of someone else’s name. So for example, my name is Mark.
M-A-R-K. So M and K. Either of those two letters could match with somebody else’s name. So for example, Micah has an M, so we could be pairs because one of his letters, beginning or end, matches with one of mine, beginning or end.
But it could also match with Kimberley. So Kimberley, it’s the first letter, is the K, matches with the last letter of Mark. So it begins by everyone first of all finding a pair.
Now if you happen to have an odd number, you can jump in if you need to. And then if you want to take it to the nth degree, and some groups are up for this, you want to find a way where you can couple all of the different partners together. So you’ve got Mark and Kimberley, but Kimberley ends with a Y. She might join with another pair, one of whom starts with the name Yvonne.
And so you got the idea. So the idea is to get one complete line, or perhaps even a circle, that is matched by the first or last letter of everyone’s name. It’s tough.
Sometimes you need a group probably over 15 more often than not to succeed at this, but if you check the details online, you’ll be able to get some what I call name first aid to be able to help out those groups that are a bit smaller or get stuck at some stage.
Here’s the basic premise of About Now. If right now I asked you to stop and count without looking at any devices and imagine how long 60 seconds is, I’m going to guess that you’re going to be completely wrong. Very few people are very good at guessing how long 60 seconds is.
And that’s the basic task for your group. A group of individuals, doesn’t matter the size, is to imagine how long from the time you say go does 60 seconds elapse. Now there’s a couple of different ways you can measure when someone decides that 60 seconds has elapsed.
I like it if I’ve got a bit of room to ask someone to move from one side of the room and cross a line at exactly the 60 second mark. Or it might be that everyone’s standing and then when they’ve reached 60 seconds, they sit down. Lots of different ways.
You have one round. Generally, the very first person who might cross the line at 40 seconds and the last person crosses at 80 seconds, the more often you do it and you might invite each group, each group member to share with the group different ways that they succeeded. The narrower the gap between the first and the last person becomes and it’s like an acetate.
It comes closer and closer to 60 seconds. Some wonderful team building lessons in there. Again, check the details on Flameo to get more of the details to be able to run this activity successfully.
Now, as promised, I wanted to give you one more no-prop team-building activity.
This has just come into my repertoire very recently with grateful thanks to Chris Cavert who shared this with me. We call it Verbal Number Exchange.
And to this date, I’ve probably done it with about 20 groups and there’s only been one or two groups that have kind of succeeded at it. I’m going to tell you, when you read it on the paper, when you read the instructions online, you go, how can this be? It looks really, really simple, but it’s not. The idea is you start by, first of all, numbering every person off.
So if there’s 15 people in your group, numbers 1, 2, 3, all the way through to 15. And then you ask everyone to interact with five other people like five times, an interaction where they might shake hands or fist bump or high five, doesn’t matter, but they swap numbers. So number two comes up to number 13.
They greet each other and then they swap numbers. So number two now becomes number 13, number 13 now becomes number two. And then that person who’s now number two goes over to another person and they meet number seven.
So now they become seven and the other person becomes two. You do that five times. Now on paper, this sounds really simple and you think, how can I get this wrong? You’ll be surprised.
I’m not going to give too much away. Give it a go. No props required. Wonderful team-building experience.
In the comments below, tell me what you discovered. Add it to the collective wisdom of the entire world of people who use group games and activities to help people connect. Maybe you’ve got a favourite no prop team building activity you would like to share.
You’re bound to have one. I really encourage you to drop into the comments (below) and share it, not only with me and I will always respond and go, oh wow, that’s great. And have you thought about… or what do you do in this situation…? So it’s adding to the collective wisdom of the programming and world as well.
And it’s no doubt the next person who perhaps watches this video will see your comment and you will have added to their repertoire as well. So my invitation to you is drop a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.
Okay, so I’ve just checked on my phone on the playmeo app and discovered that there are 26 dedicated activities for team building that don’t need equipment.
So that would fill your whole day of program and you wouldn’t need anything else to go.
So go along to playmeo.com, visit there and not only are all the step-by-step instructions completely accessible to you.
No registration, no opt-in, no credit card, but if you want to unlock all the premium content, then I recommend that you do a seven-day free trial.
It’s completely free.
You can browse to your heart’s content for the next seven days and you’ll be able to filter, sort and search for all the activities to find the perfect game for your group right here, right now.
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And if you happen to be a bit like me, old school, and you actually enjoy the kinaesthetic value of flicking through a book, you might be interested in this book.
It’s called No Props, No Problem. Inside here are 150 outrageously fun activities that don’t need equipment.
You can find it on Amazon and on playmeo.com.
Apart from there being 150 activities that don’t need equipment, all of which can feed into your team-building experiences, notice that every activity comes with a QR code. Guess where that heads? Straight to playmeo, where you can unlock all sorts of free content and video tutorials and premium data.
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Original post August 2024, last updated August 2024.