A Day in the Life: Survival Camp August 21st-27th

We ended our summer season with an exciting new program: Survival Camp. This camp featured a close knit group of participants who soaked up a good deal of knowledge about and appreciation for the outdoors. The camp focused on teaching a variety of survival skills with workshops in fire building, shelter construction, knife safety and carving, camouflage, stealth and more. It was amazing to see the focus and dedication our participants brought to these new skills.

Holmes is a beautiful land, and for many of our participants it is the first place they went to an overnight camp. For these participants the week was a homecoming, having spent the past two summers away from the land. Along with survival skills the camp featured some wilderness appreciation in the forms of hiking and nature inspired art.

Both of the Adventure Games had a survival theme as well. The first Adventure, The Year King by new staff member Devon Brinner, was the tale of a small Yorkshire town in the 1700s in the midst of a famine. At the yearly harvest festival, a group of fairies arrived in town and entreated the townsfolk to help them in their quest to bring back the health of the land, ending the blight. The townsfolk provided this help but the cost was great.

The second Adventure, Nevena Loop by the Sets & Props master Ruby Lavin, took place in a not so distant apocalyptic future, in which the survivors made new lives for themselves out of the rubble. With water being scarce, gangs formed and fought each other over control of the precious resource. Little did these groups of ruffians, scientists, and survivalists know that they would take the creation of this world into their own hands and end the existence of gods once and for all.

Even with two epic Adventures and time set aside for learning new survival skills we still managed to fit in a good deal of fun. Each morning the bunking groups would have a goofy team base survivor challenge pitting them against each other. From scavenger hunts to making wacky human obstacle courses to complete, these morning challenges were the highlight of my day. We also had time for some Wayfinder classics such as Mask Workshop, where we saw some amazing examples of “go with the flow,” and Ninja the Flag, where we used our new camouflage skills to make that game even more intense.

It was a great end to our summer of adventures.

Day in the Life:

Immersion Camp and High Meadow 2 Aug 7th-13th

The first week of overnights for the summer was a blast! An amazing, and immersive game and plenty of time together in community.
Legendary Mafia runner, Brennan Lee Mulligan, was back in action. Each round of Mafia takes place in a different town which has been plagued by mafia members. Participants in the game must decide based upon their suspicions on who to vote to eliminate (only learning the truth of their identities once they are out). Brennan set this round in Rome and telling beautiful stories for each round of this game. The citizen did win, but it was a close one! Camp also featured a community night which hosted a combo dance party/ninja the flag game that was a rousing success.

Settlers Keep, Immersion’s Adventure Game by Eliot O’Clair and Mike Phillips was epic! It started in the temple of Mona, one of this world’s gods whose heart was broken when she had to send her dog away. On this night in the temple, players attended the funeral of the greatest monster hunter of all time. Manvera, the second in command for the monster hunters gave a heart wrenching eulogy and lead everyone on a monster hunt in honor of the fallen. While the hunt was in full swing the other players realized there was a new wolf pack in town. Players ended the first night realizing that these wolves were not mere wolves, but werewolves.

The day game was an epic hunt for these wolf dens. However at the end of the game Manvera and her gang revealed that they were in fact werewolves and that everyone should join them. In the third and final installment the townspeople holed up in the woods as they retrieved all the silver in the town to make weapons that could slay the ferocious beasts. In the final stand everyone fell to the beasts except one, the person who Mona’s broken heart had fallen into.

One reason the game was so amazing for all the participants was the amount of world building that the campers got to do. Mike and Elliot gave participants the opportunity to create sections of the world that they were playing in such as the names of cities and towns, and the world’s creation myths making the game an openly collaborative experience.

It was an epic week at our other camp as well, as it was the third and final installment of the War Gate trilogy. This was years in the making and the Swarm (the alien bug race) was out to take over the galaxy once again. This time our heroes (both the human and elven races) discovered a way to get rid of them once and for all, ring peace throughout the galaxy, and save existence as we know it! With such a combat heavy game our staff became curious as to how many times each of the participants died and went to RE (the location where you receive a new character after dying). They asked how many people went once, over half the circle raised their hands, two? Still almost half. Three? Three kids with hands up Four? Only 2 kids with hands up. Five? One kid. Six? Same kid. Seven?! Still one kid. Eight? She finally puts her hand down. An epic game and week indeed.

Day In The Life:

HVSS July 24th-28th

We love to play here at Wayfinder. At Sudbury we showed this a couple different ways. First in the way we interacted with the weather. Almost everyday (we caught some sunshine on Friday) we were outside in the rain. While many activities may be cancelled due to rain, we tend to view it as more of a set dressing. This was on full display all week as campers left smiling each day despite having run around outisde in rainfall.

The other place we displayed our penchant for play this week was through the fun things the staff make up on the spot at camp. One of our SIT’s taught the Mage casting class (the class where we teach our young wizards how to use their magical abilities) entirely in character. He chose the name Jango Shizard the Cowboy Wizard which the other staff (and the camp at large) could not stop laughing about. He left quite the impression, so much so that many participants wanted to use some part of his name in their own characters’ names.

We also like to provide mental challenges for our campers. For this Adventure our production staff made an amazing 10 piece Omega cannon that the participants had to assemble in Game. They had to learn how to put it together quickly and under pressure like they would have to in Game.
The Adventure, tiled The Great War, was written by two Wayfinder veterans Henry White and Thomas Gordanier who are master crafters of adventures having over 20 years of combined camp experience. To prep for this Adventure they played a new game called Infiltrate the Flag. As the name would suggest the game is built around capture the flag. In this version we play on the full land and each team spends time strategizing and building tactics for themselves before the game begins. Strategy was an important thing to practice for this Game, as the summary of it reads “The Great War is a war story set in a fantasy world full of elves, with endless years of pointless bloodshed in the trenches. An isolated group of soldiers is ordered to hold a point crucial to a major offensive against escalating enemy forces.”

Written by Trine Boode-Petersen

Woodstock Day School & Unison Arts Center

Week 1

There was an abundance of excitement in the air at both camps as we started our first week of camp this summer. We ran around and laughed in wacky games, played capture the flag with swords (with 83 kids!), and learned about the worlds we would venture into later in the week. It is always a joy to see familiar, yet much older, looking faces on the first day; as well as the new faces of soon to be friends. At lunch I saw more than a few Magic the Gathering games take place.

At Woodstock Day School our campers won many battles, including the legendary Grass Wars (a battle that has been raging for eons; but at long last Jud succumbed to battle fatigue) and an epic round of Staff vs. Campers. A long-time staple of the WDS last day of camp, Staff vs. Campers is a battle where, as the name says, the staff are pitted against the campers. It has historically been an incredibly difficult fight to win. Yes, there are 55 kids fighting about 10 staff members, but years of experience (and ALL of the monster weapons available) usually wins out over sheer numbers. It is becoming clear that after time our campers are getting very good (dangerously good) at sword fighting and destroyed the staff the week in at least one round.

The Adventure Game at WDS was written by former WDS camper Eric Lasko, and paid tribute to the golden age of comic books. Our heroes had to stop the world from being destroyed! (Literally.) Which they did indeed do, however after that business was taken care of, they were tasked with deciding what to do with the villains who made the mess in the first place. Following deliberation, and after making the noble choice to give them a second chance, our heros noticed that the villains had (in classic comic book fashion) slipped away to plot and scheme another day!

Meanwhile, over at The Unison Arts Center, the Adventure Game was a little different. Written by a new friend to the Wayfinder Experience, Emma Puranen’s Wandering Stars was a tale celestial tribes that followed the various planets. It was a beautiful tale about putting aside small, but long held grudges and differences to do what was right. Through a series of quests, encounters and the deciphering ancient texts our heroes uncovered a 50 year old deception that began a war that tore the very universe apart. They managed to band together and work with their former enemies to defeat the powerful and false priest of the Sun, bringing peace to the universe. Plus they got to meet this sweet Moon dragon, (Moon dragons are notoriously voracious, cranky and love all things shiny).
A great week was had by all, and for many another week of adventure was to come.

Written by Trine Boode-Petersen
Photos by various staff from both camps