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Favorite Games at Holiday Parties?
An anonymous reader asks: "Somehow, I got volunteered to take care of activities for the adults at my company's holiday party. For those of you who actually go to parties, what games have you played that were a lot of fun both for the geek and just the average person?"
if there's alcohol, a good game for later would be twister.
The greatest party game in the world... I'm sure everyone has one tho... It involves logic and psychological games and I think it is great for geeks.
It works best with more than 5 people people - so lets say you have 8. Take 8 slips of paper, write the letter "M" on three of them and "C" on five. The "M"s are mafia and the "C"s are citizens.
Then, on instruction (choose a games-master for this), everyone closes their eyes and when the games-master says "mafia open your eyes", the mafia do just that and see eachother. Everyone then closes their eyes, and then everyone opens their eyes at the same time. The object of this is that the mafia know who is a citizen and who is not, and that the citizens have no idea and consequently live in fear.
Then the game begins. People talk and interrogate eachother until someone announces they beleive that someone else is mafia. They can then call a vote to "kill-off" that person, and if the vote is carried he/she is out of the game and they have to reveal whether or not they were mafia. The object of the game for the mafia is to kill all the citizens, and for the citizens it is to stay alive until all the mafia are dead.
Give it a go - it really works. Lots of tension builds up and all sorts of weird mind-games happen....
This game's pretty fun:
Give each person a piece of paper.
Everyone writes a name, folds it over so no one can read it, and passes it to the person next to them.
Then everyone writes an activity, folds it over, passes it on...
continue with a place, a time, a reason...
Then we read each one out to everyone. It gets pretty silly after you've done it a couple of times. Even geeks can have fun with it.
Are you making activities for a holiday party, or a company pep rally?
If it's the former, let all the "games" be optional. The holidays are stressful enough with vacations, shopping, planning, etc. The last thing most people want at the holidays is forced team-building.
For what it's worth, none of the company holiday parties I've attended have had games of any kind.
This scales really well to groups of various sizes containing persons of
various ages. Just make sure that when you split teams you don't put all
of something one one team (e.g., all of the geeks, all of the sports fans,
all of the young people, whatever). Split all the demographics across
both teams, and it works better.
Here's how to play: Everybody writes names of famous persons on a bunch of
little slips of paper, folds them once, and throws them in a big bowl. These
can be names of current celebrities, historical figures, literary characters,
cartoon characters, whatever, as long as they're sufficiently well-known
that there's a decent chance several people in the room know about them.
Then you take turns: a person from the one team, then a person from the
other, and then another person from the first team, and so on. You get one
minute to see how many you can get, as follows: You draw a slip of paper out,
look at it, and then without saying any part of it yourself you must get
someone on your team to say the name that's on the paper. If you've never
heard of the person, it's too bad: you make a scrunchy face and try to get
it some other way. ("Okay, the first name is the same as Ellison's first
name, and he's something you make pickles from.") You cannot pass*. When
you finish one, you draw another. When time runs out, you put the one you
didn't finish back into the bowl without revealing any more about what it
was, count how many you got, and add it to your team's score.
This is way more fun than it sounds like. With the right group of people,
someone can draw "Marvin K Mooney", "Alan Greenspan", and "Huldrych Zwingly"
one after the other. Watching their face can be quite entertaining.
* Exception: In cases of utter illegibility, when you can't make out
the letters at all, a person from the other team can examine the slip
and confirm that it's illegible, and you can skip it.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Here's how it works: Everyone brings one gift that cost something under a pre-determined price limit (our department is doing a $15 limit, my mom's book group that doesn't read usually does $10). You write out numbers on slips of paper from 1 to n where n is the number of people in the game. 1 goes first and picks a gift from the pile and opens it. 2 can then steal 1's gift or pick a new one from the pile, and so on up to n. If your gift is stolen, you have the option of stealing one from anyone else or of picking from the pile.
Additional rules: You can't steal back the gift that was just taken from you, and we often have a limit on how many times a gift can be stolen.
Not only is this a ton of fun, it can also fulfill all your holiday obligations to your coworkers (as is the rule with ours at work).
If you have too many people coming for it to be practical, you could always split people up into any number of smaller groups to play.
Yes, one of the coolest things I've found is that different groups make a totally different game of it.
It's fascinating from a game design standpoint to watch the dynamic.
But it's more fun to play the Compassionate Conservatism card on someone, or Scatalogical Bonus Round. Or Zebras...};^)
What were you expecting?