Visit any town or school fiesta across the country and you almost know what to expect before you get there. Arranged around the field or hall will be the usual cake stand, white elephant, book stand and raffle. The games on offer will also be pretty standard with smashing the rat, throwing a dart to win a prize or riot hobnobbing with kids costume races and kick the football game.

Three cheers for the city of Bristol and its Igfest, which will take place on the 17th and 18th of September. Leaving the usual festivities aside, the Igfest team have created a wide variety of imaginative games that are played all over the city. How about the hat game, in which a GPS-enabled bowler hat is sent to town? The contestants have to hunt and capture it using their mobile phones and once captured, the seeker becomes the hunted. The winner is the person who manages to wear the hat the longest.

If the game of hats isn’t for you, then you might prefer a joust on miniature bicycles, an uncivil war with cardboard forts and water bombs, or a coffin race. The highlight of the event is a game called 2.8 Hours Later, in which contestants must safely visit eight locations in the city while being chased by a team of attack zombies.

Taking a leaf out of Bristol’s book, using our imagination is a great way to spice up any repetitive task. Sick of cleaning the bathroom? Why not invest in some soap crayons and challenge your family to create pictures or play noughts and crosses on the side of the bathroom using the crayons? Washing them then cleans the bathroom and becomes part of the fun.

Tired of vacuuming? Buy a handheld carpet sweeper and let your kids play housekeeping. Alternatively, design an obstacle course and aim without touching the obstacles. Little bits of carpet covered by obstacles won’t matter too much as you’ll get them next time and maneuvering your vacuum around a slalom of books without touching them is a fun challenge and great for body flexibility.

Dusting, especially in the fall when spiders invade in search of winter homes, can be treated like a scavenger hunt with a prize for the child who finds the most cobwebs while polishing can become a game of taking pictures of funny faces reflected in polished surfaces. .

With a little imagination, cleaning can turn from a chore into a day of family fun and with a clean house at the end, that’s a family day we can all approve of.