GREAT FOR SEMINARY, YW/YM, PRIMARY, FHE!!!
The basic idea is that you have two teams or at least 4 people: one person gives the clues to a person on THEIR OWN team who tries to guess the “taboo word” within a time limit. The other team is there to make sure that the clue giver doesn’t say either the “taboo word” or any of the supporting words for that clue. If the clue giver does, the other team gets a point. If the person guessing doesn’t guess the word within the time limit, the other team gets the point. SO basically an example would best explain how this is done.
Team A (John & Mary) takes the stack of cards. Mary will give the clues to John. The timer is set and Mary begins. She looks at her first card, it’s got the “taboo word” written at the top of it in bold letters and underlined?? “GOLIATH”. Below it are the supporting clues that she can’t say like, “David”, “Giant”, “Slingshot”, and “Killed”.
Sue from Team B watches Mary to see that she doesn’t say anything she isn’t allowed. So Mary says, “this is a big guy in the Old Testament who got slammed in the head with a rock from a little guy and died.” John is on the ball and guesses “Goliath” immediately, so Mary goes on to the next card, which has “TITHING” written at the top and under it the words “tenth”, “money”, “Bishop”, and “pay”. She can’t think of a good way to get him to guess “tithing” without saying any of these words, so she passes over it.
Team B gets that point. The timer goes off and it’s Team B’s turn at the cards. So Fred from Team B gives to Sue while John (from Team A) watches over Fred’s shoulder. Timer set. Fred’s first card says, “FLOOD” with “water”, “rain”, “Noah”, and “earth”. He tells Sue that it’s an event in the Old Testament where everything got really really wet and only those on the ark survived. She guesses “the flood”. His next clue is “CONVERT” with “believe”, “gospel”, “baptize”, and “testimony”.
Fred forgets that he can’t use any of these words or any PARTS of these words as clues and says, “the missionaries have baptisms so these people can join the church.” Lame clue, he used “baptisms” so Team A gets the point. Get it?
We used any word we could think of that had to do with the LDS church or the gospel: people, places (Jerusalem, Zion…), events (first vision, creation…), gospel concepts (repentance, forgiveness, faith…), gospel words (immersion, genealogy, sabbath, murmur…), things (iron rod, liahona, arc of the covenant. ..).(Pretty much just run through the Topical Guide.) You could also do this concentrating on only one aspect such as people in the scriptures or teachings in the scriptures. It was really good practice to see how well we could explain a word. Obviously, the more background in that subject, the easier this is. I think we gave out prizes too: for the winning team a bunch of “Smarties” candies and the losing team “dum dum” lollipops. (That may or may not be appropriate for your group, but we had a funny sense of humor with our YW and they all liked the lollipops better, so they wanted to be “dum dums”. We don’t want to hurt any feelings here.) An alternate game could be 20 Questions or Who Am I? for younger children I suppose — using people like Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Adam, Daniel, Jonah, Nephi, etc).
So your lesson outline (for Primary) is:
Lesson: How well do we know the scriptures? Let’s see! Play Scripture Taboo.
Scriptures: 1 Nephi 19:23, John 5:39
Songs: (Hymns) As I Search the Holy Scriptures #277, Hold to the Rod #274
or from the Children’s songbook: Search, Ponder and Pray # 109
Refreshment/Snack:”smarties” or “Skor” candy