Whole Armor of God

Disclaimer: This game was designed by Mike Drysdale, me.

Whole Armor of God is a new card game for kids that will be available this Fall from Covenant Communications. For 2 to 4 players, the object of the game is to be the first to "put on" all 6 pieces of the Armor of God. Each piece of armor requires a certain number of "faith points" before it can be collected. Faith in Action cards are played until the total faith points equals the number required for that piece of armor. But watch out for the Fiery Darts, they will affect your Faith in Action!

As players collect the Armor of God cards they are able to lay them out on the table in front of them, in the end creating a completed person completed clothed in the Whole Armor of God!

This will be a great game for kids to play with their parents. It will also provide a great game/activity that can be included in a Family Home Evening! We will soon post a Family Home Evening guide that includes using the game to help kids learn more about the Armor of God and how they can arm themselves!

Top 10 Family Home Evening Games

Rachel Bruner, the About.com LDS tour guide, has a page about Family Home Evening games (here). It is her top 10 list of games for FHE. The games included range from fairly simple activities that most ages can play and that take very little preparation time to more complex games (such as Nephi's Boat; here) that require more preparation and are perhaps more appropriate for children around age 8 or so. There are also games for just 2 players and games that can accomodate any number of players!

I have yet to play any of these games with my family, but I know that my kids are going to have a good time with these. Let me know if you have played any of and what you thought of them.

Remember the Word: Book of Mormon Edition

I just came across this (link) "interactive dvd game." It's a trivia based game aimed at families. From their site:


Remember The Word is an interactive DVD scripture trivia game the whole family can enjoy. Your family and friends will delight in testing their scriptural knowledge with these fun and engaging questions. A sure boost to any personal or family scripture study, REMEMBER THE WORD will increase your desire to feast upon the word of God.

The site also mentions how it makes a great family home evening game/activity.

The game was created by RB Studios and is sold by Enlightened Imaginations, Inc.

They will also have a second volume coming out in the Fall of 2010. Looks pretty interesting.

Treasure Hunt

Recently I was looking for some sort of treasure hunt (based on the Book of Mormon or scripture) that I could use with my kids during family home evening. I came across this (link) idea from About.com. It looked promising from a quick glance. But after reading through it a little more carefully, I found that it didn't make a whole lot of sense. I understood how to set it all up, printing out clues and gluing things together, getting the appropriate pictures, hiding things, etc. The problem came with the clue cards. There are the "right" clues and then there are "dummy" or "incorrect" clues. Well, you glue the big X on the back of the incorrect clues. Isn't that a dead give-away to kids? I mean, all they will have to do is look at the back of the two clues they are given? Anyway, it didn't make sense to me and I had promised the kids that we would do a treasure hunt (I don't know about any of you, but I love the idea of hunting for something and using clues to find it, and my kids are no different than me; they love it as well). So I had to think of something. This is what I came up with:

I thought of a few (I think it was 5) scriptures that included things that could be found in my home. For example, I used Mosiah 3:10 where it talks about the Savior and how he would be resurrected and judge the world. We have several pictures of Jesus Christ in our home. So I cut some 3" x 5" cards in half, wrote the scripture reference on one side, and wrote a short clue on the other side. In this instance I wrote something like, "Who does this scripture refer to?" I didn't even have to say "look through the house for Jesus." The kids just automatically started looking at all the pictures of the Savior throughout the house (I had "hidden" the next clue on one of those pictures). So they went along like that until they found the last clue which directed them to the treasure we had picked out for them. All in all it only took about 10 minutes to set up and the kids really enjoyed it!

Through this activity we could help the kids become a little more familiar with scripture references, with the Book of Mormon (like where different books were found, etc.), with numbers and sequences (some of our kids are younger so they are still learning how to look up verse 20 that it comes later on in the chapter than verse 8), and we could help them with their reading aloud as everyone needed to hear the clue so that they could go searching for the next one. It's great how even little things like this really offer quite a range of teaching and learning opportunities!!