Making Guilds Fun!!!

Cheap Item Tosses

There are several games you can organize that involve tossing cheap items around. Good ways to find these cheap items are help pages around Neopia that list them specifically for the Packratters.

Toss ’em at the Money Tree

Invite your guild to collect a certain cheap item (such as ptolymelons) or a theme of items (such as healing potions) to toss at the Money Tree. Set the date. Set the time. Set the second. Then use quick stock to mass release all of these items into the Money Tree at the same time. Have a few people take screenies and record how long the Money Tree stays flooded. Try to break your own records next time around. This one is always fun.

Toss ’em in the Trash

See a stain on Neopia? Want to clean it up? Pick a trash item that goes for 1 NP and ask everyone in your guild to buy 100 of these items and throw them away! Declare war on the Yellow Growths! Take a stand against the Piles of Sludge! Be all that you can be... and good riddance to these blots on our Neopian shopping shelves!

Toss ’em at Each Other

Close your eyes, turn the scroll wheel, stick out your finger, and pick a member that has recently posted on the guild board. Try to think of a cheap item that would be perfect for that member. (Recent clumsy mishap? Zeenana Peel!) Neomail everyone in the guild (except for that member) to buy a few of those cheap items and start tossing them over at a certain time... preferably when you know they won’t be on. Imagine their surprise when they next sign in to discover a whole inventory full of Salmon Fishwiches! o_O

Toss ’em at Strangers

Invade the boards! Save those poor helpless souls with starving pets. Drown them in waterfish! Muhahahaha *cough* Seriously, though, pick an hour for everyone to check the Newbie Board, Help Board, and Trades for those new Neopian users who don’t know how to find food for their pets. Send over cheap food like Squid and Pickled Olives. Also be sure to let them know where they can find food on their own next time around. :) Be a guild that gives back to Neopia.

Board Games

What is a guild if not a private forum? There are so many simple board games you can play, that if done in small doses, and with variety, can really liven up a dull evening. Choose a day when you know most of your members will be on, but nothing interesting will be happening. Then pick a few games from this list, or make up your own, and set a thirty minute time limit to each game. They can be Neopian or guild themed. Most games do well with fairly specific themes. However, the more specific the theme, the looser the rules should be. The following examples are themed Kiko.

ABCs

P1 - A is for Kiko Armour (item)

P2 - B is for Bandage

Acronyms

P0 - KIKO

P1 - Kite In Kau Office

LAKE

P2 - Loyal And Keeps Efficient

ROCK (rock treats)

The Person Below You (True/False)

P0 - The person below me has owned a Kiko.

P1 - False

The person below me has taken a glass bottom boat tour.

P2 - True

The person below me has something Kiko in their SDB.

This or That

P0 - Kiko Pop-Up Book or Kiko Komics? (books)

P1 - Kiko Komics!

Bandana or Bandage?

P2 - Bandage

White Kiko Chocolates or Milk Kiko Chocolates?

More board games you may know: 20 Questions, Binary or Cipher Puzzles, Haiku, I Spy, Last Letter is First Letter, Rhyme, Roleplaying, Tic Tac Toe, and Word Association.

Celebrating Dates

It’s important to celebrate important dates to the guild and to your members. Birthdays and guild anniversaries can be done up right if you follow a few of these suggestions. Before you can celebrate, though, you have to know which dates to celebrate. Encourage your guild to add their birthdays to the guild calendar. Appoint someone to go through that calendar and let everyone know what is happening each week and how to celebrate it.

Guild Anniversaries

Guild anniversaries can be celebrated yearly, or if you are a new guild, quarterly or even monthly. These celebrations should be the biggest and the best. Say that you started your guild November 16, 2005. On November 16, 2006, have everyone throw cakes at the Money Tree every hour at the 16th minute mark (and maybe even the 5th second for the year). 8:16 am NST, 9:16 am NST, 10:16 am NST, etcetera. Since November is the 11th month, have your members throw their best cakes, balloons, kazoos and everything else at the Money Tree at 11:16 am NST and 11:16 pm NST. Have your guild search the Neopian boards for people talking about your guild theme and have the members throw themed items at them. Ask people in advance to make art or write poems and stories, and display these items on your guild front page or your guild web site. Don’t forget to pass on presents to each other as well.

Members’ Birthdays

Birthday cakes, balloons, and cards should always be given to members on their birthdays! Have someone look over the member’s account and announce what their gallery theme is, or if they’re collecting anything. Do they have a wish list hidden away on a petpage? Interview them. What is their latest Neopian goal? How long have they been part of the guild? Having a ‘Birthday Corner’ on the guild’s front page or website can be fun too.

Pets’ Birthdays

If you have a particularly small guild or guild themed to pets (Adoption Guilds, BC Guilds, Species or Color Specific Guilds), pet birthdays can be fun to celebrate, too. Plushies, foods, and books themed after that pet or color all make good presents. Have members interview the pet. Is the pet’s owner treating him right? Does he get plenty of books to read, delicious food to eat? Or does he spend most of his time hidden away at the Cockroach Motel? What’s his favorite toy? Encourage the pet’s owner to take him on vacation to Roo Island and visit the famous Roo Island Merry Go Round. Play a few games of hide and seek. Neopets will be begging their owners to join your guild when they hear their friends are having so much fun on their birthdays.

Guild Polls

Every guild has a poll. Neopians love sharing their opinions about everything. You’ve probably used your poll to ask how satisfied your members are with the home page or to find out a guild statistic. Here’s some more stuff that can be done with your poll.

Adventuring

You may have noticed that Neopians everywhere have the ability to create awesome adventures linked from their User Lookup. What’s more fun than going on an adventure by yourself? Going on an adventure with your whole guild! Go out there and find a fun adventure. Don’t tell your guild where to find it. That will just spoil the surprise. Post the first page of the adventure in your guild along with the options. Then create a guild poll and ask your guild which option you should take. If you are really adventurous, you could edit the personal adventures (adventures that place you instead of a specific character in the story) as you go so that it sounds like your whole guild is lost in the woods instead of just ‘you’. You can even add commentary.

Example: “A tie. No one could agree on which path to take next so Maggie opened up her massive suit case and pulled out her coin collection. She threw her Dr. Sloth Coin up into the air, Frogger called ‘Heads left!’, the coin landed tails, and everyone started down the path to the right.”

Caption Giggles

Large guilds can have a lot of fun with this one. Force the talented to come up with guild themed images. Force the funny to come up with captions, and then force the rest of your guild to vote on which captions were funniest. Who doesn’t like being forced to laugh?

Mini Clubs

Many guilds may benefit from having mini clubs. The purpose of a mini club is to let those guild members who are interested in certain aspects of Neopets to be part of their favorite guild at the same time as being part of a group of fellow obsessive Battledomers... or pet zappers... or whatever. It’s almost as if you have several guilds within your guild. You can start these mini clubs yourself, and then hand the reins over to the most zealous member of each club. The majority of mini clubs can be run through petpages and Neomail with the club leaders summarizing the activities each week through your guild newsletter or homepage.

The Mall Club

You don’t have to do anything fancy to have a mall in your guild. Simply gather up all your Restockers and find out what item categories they always have in stock. Or, even more simply, choose some categories that your members can sign up to be associated with. Make an attractive, discreet banner with the names of the categories, create a map code that links to each assigned shop, and post that on a petpage along with the code members should paste into their shops. Keep the banner and the code up to date and ask that your members check to make sure their shop codes are accurate at least once a month. No member need donate Neopoints for ads. The banner in the shop IS the advertisement.

The Adoption Club

Several of your members may have lab maps and enjoy zapping random pets from the pound to make them more adoptable. Why not get all these crazy zappers together to unite their efforts and share their perfect match stories? Adoption clubs could do a number of things to have fun. They can choose a species of pet to focus on each month, adopting just Korbats in February or pets that have the word ‘mini’ in its name in March. A member with too much time on their hands can make an official adoption petpage and list all of the club’s pets that are currently up for adoption. If a pet gets zapped into something really special, the club could organize a pass around before it finds a more permanent home. Just make sure that other members in your guild know that pass arounds are only for tossaway pets, and NOT under ANY circumstances for pets that are liked by their owners. Pounding is a risky business and it’s much too easy to find a sad story in it.

The Battledoming Club

Chances are, your guild has a few members that love to battle. You could throw them in the Stone Dome and let them have at it, or you could form a nifty club of organized battling fun. After a leader for the club is chosen and your battling members have joined up, the Battledome leader should form some guild themed battle ranks based on your members’ battle pet stats. Knockout competitions for each rank can be scheduled for each month. Experienced Battledomers could teach the clueless about the finer points of battling. You could even declare a friendly war with other guilds. You don’t have to work hard to make a battledoming club fun. The Battledome simply IS fun.

Spotlighting Club

Here’s your chance to dig in and celebrate your guild’s know-it-alls by asking them to run weekly spotlighting articles. There could be a spotlight for every day of the week and then some. Articles can spotlight such topics as members, member galleries, member petpages, avatars, weapons, games, Neopian history, Neopian shops, Neopian worlds, helpful petpages, old Times articles and comics, and of course, aspects of your guild theme. Ask someone to keep track of everyone that would like to run a weekly spotlight and people who just have a few ideas but don’t want to be obligated to weekly posts. Those that have few ideas can substitute for those who have many when they need a break.

Some Final Notes

It is always important to make sure your guild theme isn’t lost under all those new games and activities... or let your members become so busy running an activity that they neglect their own accounts. It is okay for a guild to take an activity vacation of a week or two, or to put all the activities on hiatus for that big special guild themed event. Discuss with your guild council beforehand just how you’ll handle activity down times so you won’t have to worry about it later. Assign members to run activities and then let them choose second-in-commands so that activities won’t be missed if that activity leader goes missing. And most importantly of all, REMEMBER TO HAVE FUN! :P

~~ I’d love to hear about more unique activity ideas for guilds. I also would like to thank OPD for letting me share our activities with all of Neopia. :)