The best thing since sliced bread.

PEOPLE

This game works great with about 10 people or more. If you have less people, you probably need fewer things. The skills you are looking to encourage on this one are the ability to argue the case for your ‘thing’ being the best, and to convince other people to join you.

PREP IT

You will need 10 things, one of which is sliced bread. Write these things on cards. You can pick a mix of silly things foods, activities, inventions or you can make this specific to what you do. In our group, we added in ‘the pill’ and ‘condoms’ because we are a sex ed project and we like to keep things relevant.

PRESENT IT

Gather your group in a circle. The point of the game is to find out which is the best thing of all. Put the cards on the floor in the circle and as you put them out call out what the ‘thing’ is. The group must go and huddle around the thing that they think is the best.

PLAY IT

Encourage the group to spread out as much as they can, the game will be over pretty quick if they all go to the same thing. Countdown from 10, and then look for the ‘things’ with no people standing by them. Ask ‘is anyone going to defend this thing??’ and you might get someone try to. If they do, tell them to try and sell it to the rest of the group. If no one joins them, eliminate the ‘things’ with no supporters. The person with nothing left to support must join another group, so the other groups will have to convince them to join their team.

Keep going! Pick on the ‘things’ with the least supporters and ask them to speak. Some young people will give a stirring speech about how the pill has empowered so many women to control the size of their families and therefore engage more with other parts of life, thus leading to the lifestyles women have today, and convince half the group to side with them, so this could go on for a while!

THE END

When there are only two groups left, the group with the most supporters is the winner! Don’t forget to praise everybody and thank them for taking part!

ADAPT IT

This is a nice versatile game; you can tweak the list of things so it fits with the topic you want to discuss in the session. You can make it a bigger or smaller game, and it gives people the chance to speak out in their groups. Convincing people to support a worthy cause can be fun, who doesn’t like to share what they care about? It also gives you, as facilitator, an easy time, because you can ask people lots of questions and encourage them. You can also turn this into a more considered game, like giving 10 forms of contraception and getting groups to convince each other using facts (!) Adding a few ‘silly’ items can keep the game light-hearted. You can make A LOT of noise with this game too. Have fun with it!

Mince is a youth worker in England who hates doing the same icebreaker twice.