Unlike cooking blogs that tell you their life story before they get to the recipe, I’m going to reveal the punch line first, and then explain how I got there. Here is one way to make your Capture the Flag Game much more dynamic:
Flip your playing area!
Pros of the fast version:
The shorter distance to the flags makes stealing them more accessible.
o Increased accessibility for every student to be able to steal a flag means that more students will take the risk instead of relying on their fastest teammates to do all the offense. Every student can take part in the quintessential component of the game: stealing a flag.
Because the borderline is longer, there are more areas to guard. This requires more complex strategy for effective defense.
o One of my upper elementary classes tried “holding the line” to some initial success, but as always, it only takes one to leave the formation and ruin the strategy.
More flags means continuous gameplay. Students will be constantly running back and forth as they steal each other’s flag. You won’t have the typical stalling at the borderline.
o Continuous gameplay also means a lot more running, which is good for exercise and / or energy dump.
o This version is excellent sprint training. Students will auto regulate their sprinting as well. They will be extra motivated to steal the flag because they are having more success doing so, but will stop for a quick breather when needed. However, they will push themselves to get back in the game quicker to help the team. The motivation to run is internal, versus an external motivator (coach) telling them to run.
Cons of the fast version
It is much more difficult for the teacher to officiate the game because there will be a lot more action.
o If you have some students that have a propensity to cheat, it is much easier for them to do so with this version.
o If there were a dispute on a tag, the students have to settle it with a quick game of rock, paper, and scissors.
My track and field team chose Capture the Flag as the game they wanted to play for their last practice. It was a rainy day, and we were stuck in the gym with all fifty-five of them. While our gym is nice, it is not full size, and fifty-five people certainly felt pretty cramped. If we had played Capture the Flag the traditional way, everyone would have been standing by the boundary line doing nothing. The only movement would be crossing the midline, only to immediately jump back once a defender even looked at them. The typical boundary line would have been too congested for proper invasion tactics. It would have been a giant standstill, and become very boring fast. Playing this scenario out in my head before the game was to about start, I called an audible and decided to flip the playing area. The students looked at me puzzled, but quickly realized the shift.
It completely changed the game.
To be fair, I did make one more big change: I added a lot more flags per side. Because the playing area was so much wider, it shouldn’t bottleneck. To make sure this didn’t happen, i added more flags along the entirety of the endzone to open up the full width of the playing area. You may be thinking, “By having so many flags, how did a team win the game?” When a team did not have any more of their colored flag on their side, the other team won. This truly made the saying “the best defense is a good offense” come to life. It encouraged constant invasion, especially to steal back their colored flag. A re-stolen flag had to be picked up and returned to the original side for it to count. Having a flag in hand was not enough to count as a capture, which encouraged the students to run back before it was too late.
My gym has bleachers right next to the sidelines for basketball, and I put the flags across the entirety of them. Once a player passed the midline and made it across the opposite sideline, they were in the “safe zone.” A player could stay in the safe zone as long they want, but once they crossed the line to bring the stolen flag back, they could not reenter the safe zone. Staying too long in the safe zone meant their team has less people on defense, or it was lost potential to steal more flags in the same amount of time . An invading player could pick up one flag or save someone in jail, but they could not do both at the same time. The “jail” was also the bleacher, so rescuing teammates was not difficult either. Saving someone meant both got a free walk-back to their side.
A tradition for the last day of PE is to let the students vote on what game they would like to play. I’ll take some suggestions from the crowd, and we will do a two-round voting system. My only stipulations are that I need to know the rules, and I need to have the materials to play the game. Out of the nine elementary classes that I taught, five of them chose capture the flag, and every group had capture the flag in the final vote. These classes range from twenty to twenty-five, much smaller than my track and field team. I put the flipped playing area to the test with less students to see if it was still fun. It dramatically improved the ability for more people to participate the way the game was intended to be played.
During traditional Capture the Flag, the faster kids were always on offense, and the younger students were always relegated to defense. This was not something mandated by me, it just naturally unfolded this way. Slower kids knew that they should not try to invade because they would easily get tagged on their way to the flag, and if they were tagged, their team would have less people, which meant they would probably lose the game. So the slower kids always played defense. While they were contributing to the overall team effort, the name of the game is “Capture the Flag,” and if someone never took the opportunity to even attempt to steal the flag, they are missing out on a giant portion of the game. However, with the flipped play area, all of a sudden, I saw those former “permanent defenders” take their first real attempts to steal a flag! Even if they were tagged, there was still a big smile on their face. They got to know the feeling, the thrill, of invading the enemy territory, something you don’t experience as a defender. And if they did steal a flag, the look of triumph on their face was priceless.
If you have not tried this variation, I think it is amazing for large groups, and younger ages as well. While your older students will still like this version a lot, because the distance is so much shorter, the difficulty to steal a flag is not hard. Many of your older students crave a challenge, and the short playing field makes invasion incredibly easy. However, what is not easy is keeping up the pace that is required to outright win the game. Because it is so easy to steal the flag, many students will do it, which means the flags are constantly moving back and forth. This version presents itself as the ultimate sprinting game, but there is a sneaky endurance component too if a team does not win quickly.
If you have already flipped your playing area, let me know in the comments what unique rule sets or strategies you have used to make it more fun.
Happy Capturing the Flag!