Bible games for Sunday school

You probably don't have a lesson plan from last week, a class of one age group, or a device for every child. You have fifteen minutes, a room with kids from five to twelve, and whatever screen is already at the front: a laptop, a TV or a projector. The games on this page are chosen to work with that.

Nothing here needs printing, an account, or prep the night before. If you're reading this in the car park five minutes before the kids arrive, you can still use it.

Most Sunday school rooms have one screen, so this section comes first. One adult drives the screen and the class takes part by calling out answers. Nobody needs their own device. Use the "play solo" option on the game page. It runs on a single screen, and you tap the answer the room agrees on.

Either one can run for five minutes as a warm-up or fifteen as the main activity. You control the length by how many questions you play. Sketch & Scripture is not on this list because every player needs their own device.

Some Sunday schools have a few tablets or phones on hand. If yours does, you can add Sketch & Scripture, and the quieter games work better with one screen each.

Six Degrees of Scripture and Word Nerd are usually the wrong choice here. Both need more Bible background than a mixed Sunday school group often has, especially with younger children. Bible Guessr is in the same group: it is a solo game, and it works best for children who already know roughly where the books of the Bible sit. Save these for an older youth group.

In a mixed-age group, the usual problem is a nine-year-old taking over while a five-year-old switches off. A few ways to avoid that:

Pair older with younger instead of grouping by age. In Bible Trivia Blitz, an older child can read the question aloud for a younger partner to answer, which gives both of them a job. If you have devices for Sketch & Scripture, pair a confident drawer with a child who would rather type guesses than draw.

Play in teams, not individuals, for anything with a right-or-wrong answer. A wrong guess then belongs to the whole team, so no child has to get it wrong in front of everyone on their own.

Pick the easy difficulty. Bible Trivia Blitz has an easy setting, so use it. A round that everyone can answer some of is better than a round only the oldest three children get right.

Five minutes, as a warm-up or to settle the room: one round of Bible Trivia Blitz (five questions is the shortest setting), or a few clues of Who Am I? on the front screen. That is enough to get everyone's attention without eating into the lesson.

Twenty minutes, as the main activity: two or three rounds of Bible Trivia Blitz played as teams, resetting the score between rounds. If you have devices, you could run a Sketch & Scripture session where every child gets a turn to draw. Either one fills an activity slot without needing a second game.

Games feel less like time-fillers when they match the morning's topic. If the lesson was on Daniel, ask trivia questions about Daniel. If it was on the exodus, pick questions on that topic from the trivia question bank. You can read questions straight off that page without playing the game, which helps on weeks when your room has no screen.