Hoot Hatch

Charades · ideas

200 Charades Ideas

Ten blocks, twenty ideas each, from one-gesture warm-ups to abstractions with no obvious gesture at all. Read a block straight off the page, or take one card from each and build a round that escalates.

Before you start

The rules, in five lines

  • Two teams. A player from one team acts; their own team guesses. Ninety seconds is the usual limit and about right — sixty is brutal, two minutes is a lecture.
  • No sound at all. No words, no humming, no mouthing. The moment one syllable is allowed, the game becomes a quiz.
  • No pointing at objects in the room. Acting out “clock” by pointing at the clock is the one shortcut that kills it for everyone.
  • Spelling with fingers in the air is out. So is drawing.
  • Guessing counts only if it is the whole thing. Half a title is not a point, which is why the arguing starts at exactly the ninety-second mark.

The standard signals are worth agreeing before the first round, because half a room knows them and the other half invents their own. Film: crank an old camera. Book: open your palms. Song: hold an imaginary microphone. Number of words: hold up fingers. Which word you are on: fingers again, then start. “Sounds like”: tug your earlobe. “Whole thing”: draw a circle in the air. “Close, keep going”: wind your hands over each other.

Easy ones to start with

Nobody is warmed up yet. These are one gesture each, and the point is to get the first person off the sofa without anybody dying of embarrassment.

  1. Brushing your teeth
  2. Riding a bicycle
  3. Taking a selfie
  4. Swatting a fly
  5. Blowing out candles
  6. Tying a shoelace
  7. Drinking something far too hot
  8. Carrying something far too heavy
  9. Fishing
  10. Sneezing
  11. Painting a wall
  12. Playing the drums
  13. Putting up an umbrella in wind
  14. Washing a dog
  15. Threading a needle
  16. Climbing a ladder
  17. Eating spaghetti
  18. Shivering
  19. Waking up late
  20. Taking a photograph of a group

Animals

Everyone reaches for the obvious walk first. The good ones are the animals with a habit rather than a shape.

  1. Penguin
  2. Octopus
  3. Kangaroo
  4. Giraffe
  5. Snake
  6. Woodpecker
  7. Crab
  8. Owl
  9. Elephant
  10. Frog
  11. Cat knocking something off a table
  12. Horse
  13. Chicken
  14. Bat
  15. Dog chasing its tail
  16. Sloth
  17. Bee
  18. Peacock
  19. Worm
  20. Gorilla

Everyday things, badly

Ordinary actions are harder than they look, because the room expects something exotic and takes ages to guess the obvious.

  1. Assembling flat-pack furniture
  2. Losing your keys
  3. Parallel parking
  4. Queueing
  5. Being on hold on the phone
  6. Trying to open a jar
  7. Reading very small print
  8. Sending a text you regret
  9. Missing a bus
  10. Getting into cold water
  11. Carrying too many shopping bags
  12. Untangling headphones
  13. Waiting for a kettle
  14. Pretending to like a present
  15. Falling asleep in a meeting
  16. Sitting on a plane in the middle seat
  17. Trying not to laugh
  18. Looking for your phone while holding it
  19. Getting a splinter out
  20. Walking into a glass door

Jobs

Say the job, not the uniform. The trick is finding the one gesture nobody else in that trade would make.

  1. Dentist
  2. Air traffic controller
  3. Chef
  4. Firefighter
  5. Hairdresser
  6. Referee
  7. Surgeon
  8. Postman
  9. Lifeguard
  10. Librarian
  11. Conductor of an orchestra
  12. Waiter
  13. Beekeeper
  14. Taxi driver
  15. Photographer
  16. Farmer
  17. Plumber
  18. Newsreader
  19. Astronaut
  20. Traffic warden

Films almost everyone has seen

Only films old enough or big enough that the whole room stands a chance. Nothing here needs the plot, only one image.

  1. Titanic
  2. Jaws
  3. Jurassic Park
  4. The Wizard of Oz
  5. Rocky
  6. Home Alone
  7. The Lion King
  8. Ghostbusters
  9. Mary Poppins
  10. Frozen
  11. Star Wars
  12. Forrest Gump
  13. The Godfather
  14. Finding Nemo
  15. Back to the Future
  16. Psycho
  17. E.T.
  18. Pirates of the Caribbean
  19. Singin' in the Rain
  20. King Kong

Books and stories

Titles that are also pictures. A book everyone has read but nobody can picture is a dead card.

  1. Robinson Crusoe
  2. Alice in Wonderland
  3. Treasure Island
  4. Little Red Riding Hood
  5. Moby-Dick
  6. Frankenstein
  7. Cinderella
  8. The Three Little Pigs
  9. Dracula
  10. Around the World in Eighty Days
  11. The Ugly Duckling
  12. Sherlock Holmes
  13. Jack and the Beanstalk
  14. The Emperor's New Clothes
  15. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
  16. Goldilocks and the Three Bears
  17. Hamlet
  18. The Tortoise and the Hare
  19. Pinocchio
  20. The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Television

Formats and programmes rather than plots. If the room watches nothing in common, skip this block entirely.

  1. A cooking competition
  2. The weather forecast
  3. A nature documentary
  4. A talent show
  5. A quiz show
  6. A soap opera argument
  7. A property programme
  8. Live football commentary
  9. A morning chat show
  10. A police drama interrogation
  11. An advert for washing powder
  12. A dance competition
  13. A home makeover reveal
  14. A news anchor losing it
  15. A gardening programme
  16. A courtroom drama
  17. A wildlife presenter whispering
  18. A cookery demonstration going wrong
  19. A shopping channel
  20. A sports post-match interview

Songs, without singing

The cruellest block on the page: humming counts as making a sound, so the only tools left are the words and the video.

  1. Happy Birthday
  2. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
  3. Row Row Row Your Boat
  4. Pop Goes the Weasel
  5. Old MacDonald Had a Farm
  6. Head Shoulders Knees and Toes
  7. The Wheels on the Bus
  8. Jingle Bells
  9. London Bridge Is Falling Down
  10. Rain Rain Go Away
  11. If You're Happy and You Know It
  12. Baa Baa Black Sheep
  13. Itsy Bitsy Spider
  14. Auld Lang Syne
  15. Hickory Dickory Dock
  16. Mary Had a Little Lamb
  17. Ring a Ring o' Roses
  18. Frere Jacques
  19. The Hokey Cokey
  20. Three Blind Mice

For younger players

Nothing here needs a reference, a film or a shared childhood — only a body and a room willing to be silly.

  1. Being a robot
  2. Blowing up a balloon
  3. Eating an ice cream that is melting
  4. Riding a horse
  5. Being a tree in wind
  6. Flying a kite
  7. Building a sandcastle
  8. Being a monster
  9. Skipping
  10. Brushing a very tall person's hair
  11. Jumping in puddles
  12. Being a teapot
  13. Catching a fish that is too big
  14. Playing football
  15. Sleeping
  16. Being a car
  17. Opening a present
  18. Digging a hole
  19. Being very cold
  20. Chasing a butterfly

The genuinely hard ones

Abstractions with no obvious gesture. Save these for the round where the good players have started showing off.

  1. Patience
  2. Déjà vu
  3. Gravity
  4. Jealousy
  5. Time zones
  6. Inflation
  7. Nostalgia
  8. Bureaucracy
  9. The internet
  10. Democracy
  11. Regret
  12. Silence
  13. Homesickness
  14. Loyalty
  15. Insomnia
  16. Ambition
  17. A rumour spreading
  18. Growing old
  19. Forgiveness
  20. The passing of a year

Where it came from

It started as a riddle in verse, not a mime

Charades did not begin as a game about acting. It began as a written puzzle, probably invented in France in the eighteenth century, in which a word is worked out syllable by syllable, each syllable described separately in prose or verse.1 The example Britannica gives is a small poem whose answer is Turkey: “My first is a Tartar, my second a letter, my all is a country, no Christmas dish better” — Turk plus e.1

The word arrived in English in 1776, borrowed from French and probably before that from the Occitan charrada, meaning talk, chat or chatter.2 Nothing in the name has anything to do with silence, which is a decent joke on the game it became.

Acting the syllables out came later and took over, to the point where a description of an acted charade turns up in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in 1848. The version most people now play — two teams, one side choosing what the other side’s actor has to perform, no voice and no pointing at objects in the room — became popular in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s and again after the Second World War, where it was known simply as “the Game”.1

That last detail is the useful one. The two rules that make charades work are not house rules somebody invented at your party; they are the shape the game settled into eighty years ago, and they are what stops it collapsing into twenty questions.

Choosing well

What makes a card good or dead

A good card has one image. “Penguin” works because there is exactly one thing to do. “Bird” is worse, not easier: it has a hundred possible gestures and the room guesses the wrong one for a minute.

Obscure is not the same as hard. A film nobody in the room has seen is not a difficult card, it is a wasted turn. The hard block on this page is hard because the ideas are abstract, not because they are unknown — everybody knows what jealousy is, and nobody knows how to mime it.

Actions beat nouns for a cold room. The first block is all verbs on purpose. A person who has been handed “swatting a fly” is moving within a second; a person handed a noun stands still and thinks, and standing still is what makes people refuse to play.

Songs without humming are the cruel block. That is the point of it — with sound removed, the only routes left are the words and whatever the room associates with the tune. Do not open with it.

Running it

Three things that flatten a round

Letting the actor pick their own card. The whole tension comes from being handed something you did not choose. If people draw for themselves, they draw easy.

No timer. A round with no clock is not a game, it is a person miming until somebody feels sorry for them. Any phone will do, and the countdown said out loud is better than a silent one.

Keeping score properly. Nobody remembers the score and everybody argues about it. Play to a fixed number of cards each rather than to a total, and it ends cleanly while people still want another round.

Free printable

Ten more rounds, on paper

The Bonus Round Pack is a printable PDF with ten party rounds that aren’t in Party Battle Book and aren’t on this page, plus a score sheet built to survive a kitchen table. Prints fine in black and white.

Questions about the questions

Common ones

How long should each turn be?

Ninety seconds. Sixty is punishing for anything but the first block, and two minutes is long enough for the room to lose interest and start a separate conversation. Say the last ten seconds out loud — it changes how people act.

Can you make a sound at all?

No, and it is the rule worth defending hardest. No words, no humming, no mouthing shapes. The version of the game that spread in the twentieth century specifically barred using the voice, and barred pointing at objects in the room; both rules exist because the game falls apart without them.

How do you split into teams?

Two teams, and the neat trick from the classic version is to let each team choose what the other team’s actor has to perform. It removes any suspicion of easy cards and makes the choosing part of the game.

What if nobody guesses?

Call time, say the answer out loud, move on. The temptation is to let it run — do not. The answer being revealed is often the funniest moment, and dragging out a dead card is what makes people stop volunteering.

Which block works for a mixed-age room?

The first, the animals and the ones for younger players. They need no shared references at all. The film, television and song blocks assume the room has watched and heard the same things, which is a bigger assumption than it looks.

Do you need to print anything?

No. Read a block off a phone and have people take a number rather than a card — one person calls out “fourteen” and the reader tells the actor privately. The printable pack is for the evening where phones are the problem rather than the solution.

Sources

Where the facts on this page come from

  1. Encyclopædia Britannica, “charade”. The eighteenth-century French origin, the syllable-by-syllable riddle form, the “Turkey” verse example, the description of an acted charade in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), and the American revival of the 1930s and 1940s under the name “the Game” — including the rules barring the voice and barring any indication of objects in the room. Article.
  2. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “charade”. First known use in English dated to 1776; etymology given as borrowed from French, probably from Occitan (Languedoc) charrada, “talk, chat, chatter”. Entry.

The ideas themselves are not sourced, because they are not claims — they were written for this page. The hand signals are common practice rather than an official standard; the two rules that come from a source are the ones about sound and pointing.

Keep going

More from this side of the house

Charades is one of the seven kinds of round in Party Battle Book, where it runs as Charades Blitz — act it out while the other team counts down out loud from thirty. 117 rounds, one page each, no phones and no setup.

More to read off a phone: several hundred would-you-rather questions with the rules and the history, and, with the rules in full, twenty Christmas party games and fifteen for Halloween.

Everything on the party and games shelf