Our schedule for Denver Drupal meetups puts our November meetup two days before American Thanksgiving, a time when many people are out of town or otherwise unable to attend the meetup. Last year we decided not to cancel the meetup, and instead took advantage of the smaller group to do something a little different in November, and we did the first "Denver Drupal Games", a fun site-building competition. Normally when we make Drupal sites, we have a defined project and we decide the team, the schedule, and the modules. For Denver Drupal Games, that's reversed; the team, schedule, and modules are defined, but the project is completely open.
This year, we set the teams by handing out playing cards, so we had Team Ace, Team King, Team Queen, and Team Jack. Each team had a Drupal 7 development environment with 3 required modules pre-installed, randomly selected from among modules that have stable D7 releases and didn't look like they'd take too long to make something. Ace had Webform, Login Destination, and Typogrify. King had Flag, Field Collection, and Chart. Queen had Display Suite, Heartbeat, and Twitter Pull. Jack had Calendar, User Points, and Weather.
In just a little over an hour, our 4 teams came up with some fun ideas for using their assigned modules and actually built sites. Team Ace made The BRIDGE OF DEATH!, redirecting users to a webform with challenging questions such as name, quest, and favorite color. Team King, perhaps in a bit of pandering to the judge's awesome facial hair, made Mustache-specific version of "Hot or Not", with "hot" and "not hot" flags and charts for results. Team Queen made BurntToast.com, a study of toast-burning art including Twitter comments on the topic. Team Jack made Racing2, a calendar of square-tired bicycle races, with weather forecasts and user points awarded to the winner of each race.
Greg Knaddison was our judge and gave out a fabulous prize to each team, including a ballerina figurine for the most elegant entry, a duck statue, a frog bank, and a grand prize that involved a shark on a surfboard and ... words really don't do it justice. I encourage you to check out Greg's photos of each team with their award (minus a couple people who had to leave early).
In the end, everyone had a great time, and I expect we'll be back next year for the 3rd Annual Denver Drupal Games.