Evil Cones

• Great team game for all abilities and age groups
• Works agility
• Ideal for groups of 12-20 players
• Works best on grass

Evil cones is a fun game that can be used as a warm up or as a standalone workout. It suits groups of all abilities and ages and is fairly simple to set up. It's strangely frustrating and fun at the same time and introduces an enjoyable competitive element to a session.

Equipment

A set of multi-coloured flexi-cones including three separate colours. Ideally 3-4 times as many cones as the number of players.

Setting Up

Create a four-cornered play area appropriate to the group size. Take a cone of each of the three colours and use them to mark out three of the corners. Use a fourth disctinctive marker for the final corner. It could be another cone, but make sure it's a different colour from the three types already used.

Distribute the remaining cones randomly within the play area.

Participants are divided into four teams: one team corresponding to each colour and one "evil" team.

Playing

When play starts the job of each player is to collect cones matching their team's colour and place these cones in their team's corner (which is indicated by the matching coloured cone that you put there when setting up).

While this is going on, the evil team (and this is why they're evil) steals the cones collected by the teams and puts them back somewhere within the play area.

Play continues for a pre-arranged time. One or two minutes works quite well. Much longer can become repetitive as well as a little demanding for those less fit. Several games, with a short recovery between each and rotating the teams in order to give each a chance to be "evil", is a good approach.

The winning team is the one with the most cones in their corner when time is up. Team evil cannot win, which goes to show that being bad gets you nowhere.

Rules

• Members of the coloured teams can only collect one cone at a time. I.e. each player will pick up a cone from the play area, take it to their corner, get another cone from the play area, take it to their corner, and so on.
• Members of the evil team can only steal one cone at a time, and after stealing a cone from a team's corner and replacing it, must move on to target another team. Players aren't allowed to be too evil!

Group Size

Ideally 12-20 players split into three coloured teams and one evil team. More than four teams is possible if you have more colours available.

If the number of players is not divisible by the number of teams desired then try adding or removing players from the evil team.

Variations

Everybody's Evil

In this variation there is no separate evil team, rather everybody is a little bit evil.

Once a player has collected a cone and put it in their corner, they are allowed to steal a single cone from another team's corner and redistribute it in the activity area.

Real World Example

There is a group of 14 athletes and the session is taking place in a park. Most athletes are of similar ability and aged 9-11, with two being much more experienced and aged 14.

A set of flexi cones is sorted into 12 white cones, 12 green cones and 12 red cones. A square play area is created by placing a single cone of each colour in three of the corners. The fourth corner is marked with a single yellow cone.

The 11 remaining cones of each colour are scattered randomly around the play area.

The two older and more experienced athletes are allocated to "Team Evil" and the rest of the athletes are split into three teams of four members each. Each team is allocated a colour: white, green or red.

Play continues for 90 seconds. Team evil have been working hard and there are only three cones in the green and red corners, and four in the white corner. Thus, Team White are announced winners.