We have done a couple Nerf Wars events in our youth ministry for both high school and middle school students that have had a great reception.  When first throwing around the idea, we had no idea how many students would be excited about an all out war throughout the church building.  We ordered some used nerf guns on eBay, bought about 2000 darts from Hasbro, and began letting students know that we were taking over the church building for a Nerf Wars. The hallways and classrooms were transformed into battle zones by flipping tables on their sides as barriers, turning on some war music, and inviting students to bring friends and piles of nerf guns.  In order to make the event a success, we had a few different styles of games, all of which were figured out by our awesome interns and high school students that helped run the event for us.  The following list are the games that we played.

Humans vs. Zombies

In this game everybody starts as human and one person starts as the alpha zombie.  The goal of the game is to be the last human alive.  Zombies walk around without guns and with their arms out.  Humans can stop a zombie temporarily by shooting them, which causes the zombie to stop in place for 10 seconds.  In the case that a zombie touches a human, the human must immediately drop their weapons and begin walking around like a zombie.

Team Death Match

Divide into however many teams you'd like and designate a base for the teams to start at.  The goal of this game was to be the last team standing or the team with the most players at the end of the time limit.  If you'd like to make the game last longer, you might also allow players to have multiple lives.

Capture the Flag

Traditional capture the flag tends to not work well in a nerf battle, however by varying the game a bit it does work.  Divide into two teams, set one team to defend and the other to attack.  The attacking team has unlimited lives and must re-spawn by going back to their base if killed.  The defending team only has one life.  The attacking team wins if they capture the flag and return it to their base; the defending team wins by sucessfully defending the flag for 15 minutes.

Free for All

This game is relatively self-explanatory.  Every person for themselves.  You can vary the game with a number of lives, but regardless the goal is to be the last person left alive.  It gets interesting when players begin making allies with other players and eventually have to turn their back on their team-mates.

Photo Credit: animakitty