Capture the Flag

By Jaci Romano, Resident Assistant, Newbury Hall
Western Connecticut State University

I recently held a building wide capture the flag. At my residence hall, we have a floor competition where floors gathers points throughout the year on daily cleanliness, most people in attendance at programs, most people to pass health, fire, and safety inspections, and so on.

This year, our floors are taking the Floor Warz program very seriously and the competition between the floors is strong! I decided to give floor wars points to the winning floors (we have 4 floors so I teamed them two on two…the two floors that won received the same amount of points). However, if your residence hall doesn’t have a competition between the floors, another great prize should be chosen to get your attendance up!

I ran the program outside at 8pm. If you decide to do the program, make sure your rules are set and clear with the players. To play, each team has a flag that is hidden outside. The object is to find, capture, and retrieve the opposing team’s flag. During the game you can catch opposing team members and take them to jail. This happens when you are caught on the opposing team’s side, or are tagged by an opposing team member. We had a jail on each side. You could "break out," if the "jail keeper" wasn’t watching, or you could wait for a teammate to tag you.

As a tip, make sure the flags aren’t hidden in a really tough place otherwise you will be playing all night! It's a great way to promote team work for your residents, with a social benefit as well! If you advertise it right…talking "smack" against the other teams always gets people there to prove you wrong!…your program will be as self rewarding as it was to me!