We love a good walk in nature, and we also love playing games. This is why we have found ourselves making up multiple games to play whilst on our walks. These are easy to play, easy to adapt, and just simple good fun that can be added into a walk whilst not interrupting our conversation and general observation of our surroundings.
A classic that we play nearly every holiday (as it takes us several days) is the alphabet scavenger hunt. We each have to spot something on our walks that start with each letter of the alphabet, in order, and first to Z wins. We’ve added rules over time which you can choose to include, or not, or make your own. For example, you cannot say something the other person has said, words spotted must stick within the ‘theme’ of that walk (e.g. countryside, coastal, mountain etc), words cannot be concepts, if a category word is chosen then you take out all of that category for yourself (e.g. if you say ‘bird’ you can’t then say robin, chaffinch, magpie etc later). This is an easy background game to play and encourages you to identify what’s around you in the hopes that you’ll learn a word that will help you later on. We always have great fun with it, although we are yet to actually make it through the whole alphabet – the day we do will be tense and the winner will be ecstatic!
An especially easy game to play and adapt is a ‘find a #’ game. We were on an autumn walk with acorns completely covering the floor, when Craig said “whoever finds the biggest acorn wins” – cue competitively studying the floor as we walked through the woods. I also added in “whoever find the smallest acorn wins” too. This was an additional game to a foraging walk, so I kept the acorns we gathered to give to a friend’s pet mouse. Our competitiveness is not too serious and just adds funs to our walks. A few months later we played “whoever finds the roundest/nearest perfectly spherical pebble on the beach wins”. You could do best stick, brightest flower, biggest leaf, the possibilities are endless and are easiest when inspired by the local environment.
‘Find the largest leaf’ is a fun and easy autumn game to play
Another simple bit of fun in nature but encouraged with a little reverse psychology, is a hollow tree trunk big enough to climb through. I wasn’t going to at first, but when Craig said “I bet you can’t crawl through that tree trunk”, well I just had to then didn’t I?! Another similar classic is climbing trees and fallen trunks etc. Always make sure you’re safe doing this and not having a negative impact on nature whilst you’re doing this, but I can assure you that you are never too old to climb a tree, and I have more fun doing it now than I did as a child (maybe because I have longer legs?)
A game that has become a Hickspear classic and comes back each year is ‘first to catch a falling leaf’. A delightfully energetic game that starts when the leaves start to fall each autumn. Also a good game to play in any woodland or arboretum, and much trickier than it sounds!
A classic but a goodie is finding shapes in the clouds. We absolutely love the sky and all the different presentations it comes in, and when the clouds make shapes, we like to advance on this by making a story, as often there is also a slight breeze that moves the clouds and allows the story to move along as new shapes are made. We can stand for a good few minutes gazing up at the sky, seeing the shape and creating a story together that they have inspired.
These games all have very similar themes – they are simple, spontaneous and joyful. It is so easy to find fun in your surroundings when you’re out in nature if you just take a moment to notice what’s around you, and I’m sure that we are going to keep on finding many more games in the future. I hope this post might inspire you to play a game too when you’re out on your next walk, even (and especially) if you’re all adults!
Finding trees to climb or crawl through is a classic which never grows old
Leave a Reply