Your pulse quickens when you realize the difficulty of what you once thought was a trivial task. The handful of M&M’s in front of you suddenly becomes a mass of no certain color or shape and all of the cups, helpfully numbered in front of you on the table, start to blend together.
Your simple task, to separate a tray of M&M’s by color in under a minute, suddenly becomes impossible. Just like the cereal box puzzle or balancing soda cans.
This is the drama of Minute To Win It.
Last night, the campers were splits into four teams and had to complete tasks such as these at four different stations. Some games were simple, some were hard and all of them were pretty fun.
At the art shack, some campers had to knock cups off of a table by releasing the air from a balloon. Others had to try and piece together a cereal box that had been cut into twenty pieces or try to keep two feathers in the air using nothing but their breath.
In the pavilion, Brennan showed his skill at shooting rubber bands by knocking five empty soda cans off the table well before his minute was up. Hans Vandenberg was able to empty the correct amount of soda out of a can in order to get it to balance so quickly it looked like it was his job. Some campers struggled with the aforementioned M&M’s game, but when it came to picking them up with a straw and moving them from bowl to bowl Meier Parr proved to be a beast until he knocked over the bowl with the straw.
There were some interesting moments in the gym, too. Thanks to a game called Paper Dragon (which involves unraveling two rolls of streamers in under a minute) T.J. Pallone was seen in a Rambo-style streamer headband for the rest of the evening. It was also at the gym that some people had to catch tennis balls in a bucket on their head, which sounds like a challenging game.
After the campers had their dexterity challenged in the rec hall by stacking cups, it was time to head up to the gym for the final challenge. In this competition, students had to launch a marshmallow from a plate by hitting it off of a table with a broom and then catch it in a cup. It’s a lot more difficult than it sounds, as Sam Greenberg can attest to. But some campers, namely the Nocket clan and Oliver Schwartz, proved to be extremely adept at this strange task. Stevie and Parker Nocket bested older brother Forrest by catching five to his three, but Oliver outpaced the whole field by snagging eight.
This feat was enough to give his team, led by counselor Taylor, victory for the night. Congratulations to them, but all of the games were fun and win or lose, I think everyone had a great time.
But what else do you expect in a place like this?