We played 9-square-in-the-air with the church youth group, today. If you’re not familiar, it’s like four square, but overhead, like volleyball.

As part of the exercise, we had the youth set it up without talking, which went better than expected...except they forgot to get a ball to play with. (we actually set it up as just 4-square-in-the-air, due to how many people were there.)  

The way we play, whoever is in the champion position get’s to make rules (calvinball style!) to edit the defaults. We had some fun ones like:

  • "shortcuts": if you get somebody out ahead of you, you can go straight to their position instead of the normal rotation
  • "spikes": you can reach over/across into somebody else's square for your hit
  • must hit twice
  • keep it going: you have to try to hit it if it's going out
  • use a fist: must use bumps/punches, not sets, etc.
  • dance: you have to do a dance after you get somebody out or instead you are out
  • equipment is lava: if you touch the bars, etc. you are out
  • lowered: towards the end, we started moving the height down
  • permanent out: we ended with this as our last rule, to bring it down to find the final champion

One common collection of rules started to become our default. We called it "2HISS", and it means "2 hits allowed, spikes allowed, shortcuts allowed.

Lots of fun!