Imaginative icebreaker games

Icebreaker games are only limited by your imagination, and once you have tried and tested a few of the more traditional ones, you'll feel more confident and able to adapt and expand on these. You may even feel inspired to make up a new game of your own!

As a drama teacher I have used many icebreaker games to help to relax, motivate and energize my students, whether it is a group of adults or a group of children. And I have found, time and time again, that the more imaginative and fun the icebreaker game, the more effective it will be.

Creating themes for your icebreakers

Icebreaker games can be based around a theme, which can be adapted to suit your particular group. For example lets take the theme human sculptures. There are different icebreaker games that can be played around this theme. Here are a couple of examples:

Human Sculptures

• Divide the participants into two groups and announce a topic such as sports or films. Each group then discusses and decides on an idea to depict that topic. Ask the two groups to create a sculpture using their bodies within an allocated time, say 5 minutes. Each team looks at each other's sculpture and tries to guess what the other team has formed.
• Still within the two groups, this time the participants will not know what sculpture they are forming. Without talking the first participant will start the sculpture off by forming a shape with their body. One by one the other participants in that group will add to the sculpture, while the other group are watching. Once complete the other group then discuss the sculpture - what it looks like and what emotion it portrays.

There are heaps more icebreaker games to choose from in the book 'The mega-value explosive icebreakers & games galore! package' by Patrick Chan. Good luck!