Play hide'n'seek with your kids in a dark house. Here's the rules:
- The kids are each armed with a rubber band or a rubber band gun.
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- Kids can hide anywhere they can fit in the rooms adjacent to your front door. (After you've done this a few times, they can hide anywhere in the house.)
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- The house lights are all off. (Later, you can play the game with variations in the lighting. But start in full dark.)
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- You are "it." You must come out of your master bedroom and find all the kids before they can shoot you. (You can use a flashlight or not -- depending on what you think you would 'really' do.)
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- If a kid sees you first, he can shoot you with his rubber band. Even if his shot misses, you lose because he saw you first. Real bad guys have guns that shoot more than one round.
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- If you spot a kid, you call him out of his hiding place and have him sit somewhere safe while you find whoever is still hiding.
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- The round is over when all the kids have come out. But play more than one round, and keep track of the number of times you "die" and the places you did so.
Sounds kinda childish, doesn't it? What it does is give you a deep appreciation for the number of places in your home that an attacker could hide. It gives you a visceral understanding of the pluses and minuses of your own floor plan and how defensible your house is. It teaches you which way to look when you come out of your bedroom door, too.
Finally, this game helps you understand why "clearing a house" is a game for fools and why the smartest and best thing to do if you think there's an intruder is to hunker down somewhere safe and let them come to you.
pax