Another mad game that’s fairly pointless, but lots of fun and breaks the ice. There are no real winners and losers – it just runs on until everyone’s had enough!
You need a large-ish hall for us, and probably at least 8 players.
Put out two less chairs than there are players, scattering them around randomly so that they are all slightly further than touching distance away (that is, if you sit on a chair and stretch out your arms, you wouldn’t quite touch someone else doing the same thing in another chair). The aim is to create a sort of “maze” that can be dodged around by the two people who will be running around. This doesn’t matter too much, but there does need to be enough space to move between the chairs, but not so much it’s easy to run between them.
Pick two players, one is the “cat”, the other is the “mouse”. The game starts like normal “it”. The “cat” chases the mouse in and out of the chairs, and tries to touch him/her. If the “cat” manages it, the roles swap, and the “mouse” is now the “cat” and the “cat” is the “mouse.”
The fun bit is that the “mouse” can, at any point, touch the shoulder of someone who is sitting down. The person sitting down must then stand up, and becomes the “cat”, while the old “cat” now becomes the mouse!
There are a couple of variations. Firstly, the “cat” and “mouse” don’t have to swap when the “mouse” sits down – the person who stands up can become the “mouse” instead.
Secondly, you can have them lying on the floor instead of sitting in chairs, and the “mouse” must lie down beside them to switch to a new “mouse”. I’ve also heard of this done where they lie down in pairs, and the “mouse” lies down to make them three in a row, and the person ‘opposite’ the “mouse” in the threesome becomes the new “cat”.