The VPN Tunnel Relay

A boy in a wheelchair and a girl hold hands across the greenhouse floor to make an arch, and another girl runs through it at full tilt. A fourth child stands in the open beyond the arch with both arms spread, ready to tag whatever crosses outside it. A chalkboard against the potting bench reads THE VPN TUNNEL RELAY.

Choose one player to be the ISP, the internet service provider, who stands in the middle of the room. Everyone else is a Data Packet, trying to get from one side of the room to the other without being tagged. If the ISP tags you, you have to hand over a token.

The catch is that the ISP can tag anyone they can see. The protection is the tunnel: two players can hold hands to form a corridor, and any Data Packet running through that corridor is safe. The ISP cannot tag inside it. The team has to cooperate to keep a tunnel open while Packets sprint through, which is harder than it sounds when the ISP is moving and the tunnel players are trying to hold their position.

Once you have run through a tunnel a few times and arrived at the other side with your token still in your pocket, the VPN concept clicks. A VPN creates an encrypted channel between your device and a server somewhere else, so that your ISP can see that data is travelling but cannot read what it says or where it is ultimately going. The hands-joined tunnel in the game is a physical version of exactly that.

A good question to sit with after the game: what if the ISP could see where the tunnel starts and ends, even if they could not see inside it? That is a real limitation of VPNs.

The rules

Every Data Packet starts with three tokens. A token that crosses the room goes in a container on the far side. A Packet tagged by the ISP hands one over instead.

Two players holding hands make the tunnel. Nothing can be tagged inside it. Tunnel holders have both hands occupied, so they carry nothing while they stand there, and that is the cost: every pair holding a tunnel is two people not running.

The round ends when every token has crossed or been taken. Compare what arrived against what the ISP collected, then swap the ISP and run it again.

With nobody holding a tunnel everyone is in the open. With everyone holding tunnels there is nobody left to run through them. The number in the middle changes with the size of the room and how fast the ISP is.

What you need

A token for each player, small enough to run with in a closed hand. Room to cross, with clear space at both ends.

Nothing is written down for this one. The tunnel is two players and their arms, wide enough to run through without the join breaking.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-08.