My Girl Scout Troop Earned the Retired Games for Life IPP During a Troop Trip

What I'm pretty sure will be the last Girl Scout badge I earn with my Girl Scout troop was also one of the most fun!

My Girl Scout troop does earn current, official GSUSA badges, but there's not enough variety in those badges to accommodate the full scope of all their interests (you should hire me to fix that, GSUSA!), so we've always incorporated retired and Make-Your-Own badges into our troop activities. 

In particular, the kids have been wanting to earn the retired Games for Life IPP for over a year, but what with one thing and another, between cookie sales and volunteer work and their high school activities and troop travel and part-time jobs, we just never made time for it. But I also like to have the kids earn a badge while we travel, and considering that there's also not a good Travel badge for Ambassadors (SIGH, GSUSA!), when we were planning our Spring Break troop trip to Boston I figured that this Games for Life IPP would be as good as any to earn then... as long as we rewrote it entirely, of course!

And if you're going to be traveling, what better badge to write than one all about travel games?

That's how this Games for Life IPP turned into the super fun, travel-themed Gamemaker badge. And this is what the kids did to earn it!

Step 1: Teach someone a new-to-them travel game. Learn a new-to-you travel game.

The kids actually completed this step last summer during our troop trip to Cincinnati--I told you they'd been wanting to earn this badge for a long time! When the kids were packing for that trip, I asked them each to include a favorite travel-friendly game. Then while we were hanging out in our AirBnb that night, they spent some time together teaching each other their games and playing them. Turns out my kid isn't the only one with a decade-plus obsession with Professor Noggin!

Step 2: Make and play Travel BINGO.

My partner made super cute blank BINGO cards and printed them two-to-a-page onto cardstock. I brought the cards, pens, and some scrap paper, and bought a couple of pairs of $1 scissors during our grocery shopping trip. I explained the concept of what I wanted us to do, then we all worked for a while on writing out fun BINGO prompts of things to do or see, inside jokes, and little dares, cutting each prompt out, and folding up all the little slips of paper and putting them into a hotel coffee cup. 

We passed the cup around, and each person took a prompt, wrote it in a blank space, and then put the prompt back so someone else could maybe get it. After we'd gone around a couple of times and I'd gotten an idea of the overall tone of the prompts, I also sneakily wrote out a few more and popped them in, ahem. I wanted every kid to have a prompt that was directly about them, and the kids seemed really excited about the prompts that read like little dares. 

When we got to the last couple of rounds I pulled out all the prompts one by one and read them out loud, and people could use their last couple of blanks to "adopt" a prompt if nobody had pulled it yet, or just write one down if it sounded especially fun.

Everyone's BINGO games turned out so great! Here's mine from the first night:

The kids and the chaperones LOVED this activity! It really seemed to encourage everyone to stretch themselves to try new things and put themselves out there a little more than they might otherwise have. We're not very competitive together and there weren't any prizes, anyway, so we just cheered each other on and all tried to get BINGOs.

Step 3: Make and play travel games in an Altoids tin. 

Only a Girl Scout troop leader can travel TO a place with more luggage than they travel home with, because I traveled to Boston with six Altoids tins and a ton of cardstock travel game templates in my backpack, and I came home with zero Altoids tins and far fewer cardstock templates!

For this project, my co-leader donated all the Altoids tins, and I printed several of these gameboard templates and these tangrams. If we'd been home, we would have had more craft supplies available and so could have put the effort into decorating and embellishing the Altoids tins, but for our immediate purposes it was enough for the kids to put together some fun travel games in their Altoids tin, then try them out by playing together. 

Step 4: Play a live-action game.

There are actually tons of games of this sort available when you travel to most cities, from Escape Rooms to Murder Mystery Dinners to Scavenger Hunts or even Geocaching. Boston has all of that, and I was especially tempted by the scavenger hunts, but I was already force-marching the kids around town enough while making them earn their Junior Ranger badges, and the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum is at least less walking!

When we checked in for our tour, we each got a real character to play:

Alas, you didn't *have* to be in character during the tour and activities, so in that manner it wasn't so great for the badge, but the paid actors were VERY in character, so at least the kids got to experience that part of it. 

And we all threw some tea into Boston Harbor, so we *were* all in character a little bit!

Step 5: Play a historical or geographically-relevant game.

I had thought about bringing the supplies for everyone to make a set of Nine Men's Morris and play it, but I was already bringing so many other craft supplies that I ended up deciding not to pack even more. I was VERY excited, then, to see that Abigail's Tea Room, part of the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, not only had sets of Nine Men's Morris, but there was also a costumed actor who taught one of the Girl Scouts how to play.

And then she could teach the other kids!

Step 6: Play some travel solitaire games, then create your own original travel solitaire game for someone else to play.

I printed and packed mazes and word search puzzles for our trip--I had SO much Girl Scout stuff in my luggage! I'd intended for us to do them one night in our hotel, but our last couple of nights had been so busy that we didn't get to them until we arrived at the airport for our flights home.

That actually turned out to be a terrific time to pull them out, since the travel games could really fulfill their purpose of keeping the kids actively entertained while we waited for our flight, then again during the long layover before our second flight. 

I also brought along graph paper (because of course I did) so that the kids could create their own word searches and mazes and Sudokus. I loved seeing what everyone came up with, and some of their word searches were REALLY hard!

This turned out to be the perfect badge for a troop trip! Rewriting badge requirements should be, in my opinion, a far more normalized process within Girl Scout troops. It requires the kids to be actively involved in the planning, it increases relevancy, and it improves buy-in much more than using the pre-packaged activities does. 

These travel games also modeled a screen-free, social way for the kids to entertain themselves during our long travel days. People DO need brain breaks while traveling, and while your phone is always an easy solution, I think the kids saw that ultimately it was a lot more fun to chat together while solving word searches than it would have been for each of them to sit silently together on their phones. Boston BINGO was also SO much fun, and really improved camaraderie and kept everyone mindful of encouraging, cheering on, gently teasing, and just plain interacting with everyone else. 

So, fine, GSUSA. If you'd had an Ambassador-level Travel badge like *I* think you should, we would have just earned that and not stretched ourselves to make this Games for Life badge fit our trip, and we would have missed out on all the fun we had making and playing travel games together. 

I still think you should have an Ambassador-level Travel badge, though... You could even put travel games ON it!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!