Now that school is out and summer has officially arrived there’s going to be a lot more hours dedicated to outside play.
What better way to celebrate the nice weather than to blasting your friends with rubber tipped foam darts?
To help you organize your battles, here are 5 proven Nerf gun games to help you get started. While we usually play in our backyard (which is small) games can be modified to larger playfields like parks.
If you’re looking for indoor games, click here.
Capture the Flag
This is perhaps the most popular outdoor game, and it can be modified to fit the size of your group or playing area.
The rules haven’t changed much since summer camp, although we’ve added a few twists to make them work with Nerf guns.
Anything can be used as a flag – but old old bright shirts work especially well
The playing field is divided in half and each team has a base (usually a tree or post) with a flag hanging from it. Your team must cross into enemy territory, capture their flag and return it to your base without getting hit. At the same time, you’re trying to defend your flag and keep the opposition from capturing it.
While you’re on your half of the field, you can’t get shot – only when you’re on enemy ground. If that happens, you must return to your half of the field and it counts against your hit total (usually 10 or 15 hits before you’re out for good). After 5 or 10 hits (or both), you must go to your team’s hospital and spend time recharging for a minute or two. This saves your butt if you happen to get run down by someone who unloads an entire clip into your backside.
If you get hit while carrying the other team’s flag, you must drop it immediately (it can be retrieved by the team it belongs to but it must be returned directly to base).
The game is over when one of the teams captures the opposition flag and safely hangs it with their own flag.
Get Momma To the Hospital
Divide players into two teams and choose one person from each team to be a pregnant momma. The goal of the game is to get momma to the hospital (the other team’s home base) before their momma gets to your home base.
Mommas have unlimited lives, but each time they get hit, they must return home and start all over again. Everyone else on her team are acting as escorts – they are allowed five hits before they are out. So while you’re escorting your momma, you also have to think about defending your home and not lose too many escorts.
We played this scenario at our baby shower when Amanda was actually pregnant (we dressed Jeff in a wig and a kickball belly). Since mommas are super pregnant they can only walk – no running. Of course, the escorts can run all they want and mommas only get a single shot pistol for defense.
This is a great team game because it forces players to work together and use strategy. Do we use more players for defense? Do we go for an all out frontal push (Get it? Push?) using escorts as human shields?
American Gladiator
This game is an homage to the old 1980s TV show American Gladiator and is one of the best 2-person games we’ve ever invented.
On the show, the gladiators shot tennis balls out of a cannon while competitors moved through an obstacle course. Along the way they would find ever-more accurate guns to return fire.
If you’ve never seen the show, here’s a vintage clip on youtube
Snipers make use of high ground and good cover during a game of American Gladiator
Set up your playfield the same way the show was created, using a high well-defended position (like a deck or a tree house) overlooking a relatively open obstacle course with sporadic cover. The gladiator on the high ground is armed with a sniper rifle and lots of ammo.
Competitors have no weapons and must move through the course without getting picked off. Set up a half dozen places for cover where different guns are waiting – each with only one round. Competitors get one try to hit a very small target near the sniper (or hit the sniper themselves). If they do, they win. If they get tagged they lose.
Arrange the weapons on the obstacle course so that the least accurate guns are furthest from the sniper but with better cover. By the end, you should be right under the sniper’s nose with little cover, but with a really good blaster. You can also put a time limit on the game to force the action
For this game we give the sniper a Mega Centurion, which was really fun, but it has a tendency to jam and takes a while to reload. To make this game work, competitors had to freeze if the sniper was reloading or having trouble with jams.
Four Corners
Another good game when you have an unbalanced playfield –where one side has lots of cover and the other side doesn’t.
Players with the good positions have 10 lives while those with little cover have 15. The players with the disadvantaged position have one thing going for them. During the game, if they can touch all four corners of their playing area, they can gain 5 extra lives. If every member of the team reaches all four corners, they win. You can also win by eliminating the other team completely.
This encourages lots of fast moving action, especially when players are in desperate need of extra lives and they’re willing to take risks to gain a bonus. We put glow in the dark darts in the corners and make the players collect them, to prove they actually earned their bonus.
Team Triage
In this game, the only goal is to eliminate the competitors on other teams. Divide the players into four balanced teams. Each player is allowed a set number of lives (usually 10 or 15). No alliances are allowed between teams!
The twist here is that a hit on a non-critical body part like an arm or leg don’t count against your total lives. If you get tagged in one of those areas, you can no longer use it, but you’re still alive.
If you’re wounded, you must stop using that body part and limp to one of the field hospitals on the playfield. If a wounded player can get there and tie a flag on the injured body part, they can continue in the battle. Have fun with it – make the players tie their arms to their sides, or wrap a bent leg in half so it’s immobile. While players are in the hospital, they can’t be shot or do any shooting, but once they leave, they are fair game.
The fun is to try to function on only one leg or fire a blaster using only one arm. You can trade weapons to accommodate injured players – but will you help or hurt your team? You can lose more than one appendage (both legs for example) and second hit on a wounded body part does nothing. Once you get hit in a critical area, the bandages come off and you’re whole again – but you’re down one of your lives.
For this game, we had participants ranging in ages from 3 to 80