A certain large youth organization, while promoting the following game on the local and provincial levels, will not publish my article about said game because calling children 'hogs' and tying them up may upset the parents. They are more than willing to publish the article if I remove those 2 points...Riiiiiight. If your not so PC orientated, read on, otherwise read the footer at the bottom.

Introduction

How do you make practicing knot tying fun and exciting for Venturers when you only have 20 to 30 minutes? Tyson, one of the Rovers in our crew came up with an ingenious idea to achieve this target. This game reinforces the ideas that not only are proper knots necessary, but make life much easier. The game is called hog-tying, and it's simple, fast paced, and good for anyone 8 years old and up.

Divide your Venturers (in our case) into two teams. Team A is the farmers, team B are the hogs. There must be more hogs than farmers. Each of the hogs has little piece of fabric or rope to be their "tail" that they tuck into a pocket or back of their pants. Do not tie the tail to your clothing! Each of the farmers has a piece of knot-tying rope about 1.5 metres (4 to 5 feet, error on the short side) long. Make sure to have a bunch of extras with a leader on the sidelines. Define the boundaries of the game, the size of a gymnasium is more than plenty for 20-30 players; this area is called the pigpen.

How to Play

The rules are simple; the hogs are released into the pen and spread out. After a few seconds the farmers are released. The goal of the farmers is to grab the tail of a hog and yank it out. Once they have the tail, the hog must sit/lay on the ground and have their legs and arm tied together. No Active Resistance, That leads to injuries. Lying on your arms, or laying spread eagle is perfectly acceptable though. Once they are tied up, the farmer returns their tail to them and runs to the leader with the spare ropes to get another one. If all the hogs are caught and tied up by whatever time limit is set, the farmers win.

Once the hog is tied up, they are immobile and cannot untie their own rope or any other hog. But the hogs are not totally defenseless. They can obviously run and dodge around the farmers. Any other hog that is free and running around can also run up to and untie their fellow hogs. If a hog gets completely untied then they are free to run away and continue rescuing other hogs. Farmers cannot retie a partially untied hog, so tying granny knots and half hitches will just ensure the hog escapes faster than if they were tied up with proper knots. Remember to mock the farmer who tied you up for their shoddy knot work.

After the time limit is up, count the number of caught hogs, and then the teams swap roles. Repeat with the roles reversed. Continue for a couple rounds and whoever has the most captured hogs win. If the game goes too quickly or easily for the farmers, congrats! Your section knows its knots! You can add leaders into the mix to make it harder, or you can make three teams, one of farmers, two of hogs. You can also hand out shorter ropes, this forces them to be more efficient in their knots. One bowline uses less than half the rope of 3 or 4 half hitches, as well as being harder to untie (and won’t slip either!).

Have fun!

- Scott Gordon, Rover with the 193 Knights of Cerberus and Council Youth Commissioner for Chinook Council Alberta.