100 Group Games: Skills in Facilitating Group Games

Making good use of group games is immensely beneficial in group practice, as games help drive engagement, foster the mood, achieve goals, and ultimately promote the group’s development. If group facilitators are able to grow their game portfolio and keep enhancing their game facilitation skills, they will surely make every group more lively, vibrant, and motivated. For this reason, game facilitation skills have been part of my social work teaching routine at City University of Hong Kong. Whenever appropriate and possible, I would leverage games in class to help students get to know each other, build relationships, and drive their engagement in the course, while at the same time demonstrating how games can be facilitated in a group environment. I also offer students the opportunity to run warm-up games, share my experience in facilitating and leveraging group games, and encourage them to keep looking for more suitable games.

Together with my social work students, I have built a collection of over 100 games to help social work practitioners and students systematically acquire game facilitation skills and boost their confidence in game facilitation. These games have all been tried with the students and modified accordingly. Many students, who later applied these games in their social work fieldwork practicum training, have confirmed their suitability and practicality. Frontline social workers and social work graduates who have adopted our collection of games have found that they are not only suitable for facilitating local group activities, but they are also useful for training other facilitators of group activities.

In light of this positive feedback and encouragement, I decided to turn our collective effort into a book. In 2009, the Chinese edition was published by the City University of Hong Kong Press. In addition to our collection of games, the book also included four theory-focused essays detailing the concept, practice sharing, and application skills of group game facilitation, which are covered in the first section. The first essay is my reflection on the key elements of facilitating group games. In the second essay, Mr Yau Kuen Lau illustrates the briefing and facilitation skills in group games, giving readers a systematic look at every meticulous step of game facilitation and the art behind it. The third essay is by Mr Kwok Wing Chan and focuses on the debriefing skills in group games, underscoring the importance and essence of the “debrief” during group games. In the fourth essay, Mr Fai Kuen Leung discusses the risk assessment and precautions of group game facilitation, making it clear to readers that game facilitation is a painstaking task that requires careful planning and safety rules. The second section of this book provides the details for 100 practical group games. These are grouped into four categories: (1) warm-up and ice-breaking, (2) mutual understanding, (3) group cooperation and cohesion, and (4) problem solving. The collection was built on the contributions of 43 social work students and my own game repertoire. I have since systematically organised, edited, expanded, trimmed, and supplemented the details of the games with appropriate revisions and compilation.