Life sized PAC MAN combined activity

For a recent combined activity, we needed to make decorations for a dance we were hosting the following weekend, but we knew it wouldn't take the entire time and wanted to have something fun to look forward to after the work was done...

We decided on a Life-Sized Pac-Man game!

I originally saw the idea on a youth-group website, but I couldn't find any real instructions on how to actually set it up or clear rules on how to play, so I just made it up. Feel free to adjust to your own needs.

While everyone else worked on the decorations in another room, I asked two of the YM leaders and a few of the youth to start setting up the maze for the game in the cultural hall (gym). I gave them a simplified version of the game layout to use as a guide (something like this photo below):

I think they adapted it a bit, which was totally fine (using actual chairs is a little different than drawing a straight line!) It just needs to be some sort of maze with at least a few entrances/exits. They used ALL the chairs from our table/chair storage room and the chapel overflow. It was AWESOME!

We used white lids (that I already had) from the dry-pack cannery as the power-pellets. You could use frisbees or paper plates instead. Pellets were distributed around the maze before each round.

I made "ghost" signs for the 2 people who volunteered to be the ghosts, so the audience could tell who was who! Once the game starts, its sort of a frenzy!

Pac-Man and the ghosts (we had 2, you could add more) all started in the middle. We gave Pac-Man a 5-second head-start, then the ghosts could leave the center and start pursuing Pac-Man.

The object was for Pac-Man to collect all 6 Power-Pellets without being tagged by a ghost. The Power-Pellets did not give Pac-Man special powers or immunity. Instead, we placed 1 special (striped) pellet in the maze that Pac-Man could use for immunity for 1 "tag". The striped pellet did not count as one of the 6 pellets that they had to collect to win. This is different than the game of course, but had to make some adjustments for real-life!


ADDITIONAL RULES (for safety):

1. Nobody can jump over or reach across/under rows to tag (or grab pellets). Must stay in the "lanes"
2. Pac-Man can walk quickly (we found running to be surprisingly dangerous), but ghosts MUST walk slowly (Frankenstein style).


Fun activity, everyone got a chance to be Pac-Man and/or a ghost a couple of times. No cost, easy to do, and different!