The Christmas A to Z
Players 3–20Time 5–10 minYou need nothing
A warm-up that works while people are still taking their coats off, because anyone can join it halfway through.
Pick a category out loud — carols, films with snow in them, things that end up on a Christmas table, presents nobody wants twice.
Going round the room, each player names something in that category beginning with the next letter of the alphabet. A for angel, B for bauble, and on.
Five seconds to answer. Miss it and you are out of that round; the alphabet carries on from where it stopped rather than starting again.
X is the whole joke of the game. The only workable rule is that anything with an X anywhere in it counts — and then you let the room argue, because the argument is worth more than the round.
Finish the Lyric
Players 4–20Time 10 minYou need nothing
A line of a Christmas song stops halfway and somebody has to finish it, which turns out to be much harder without the tune.
One player says a line from a carol or a Christmas song and stops mid-sentence. Spoken, not sung — the tune is what everybody is actually remembering, and taking it away is the game.
First person to finish the line correctly takes a point and sets the next one.
No phones. The round is over the moment one comes out, and everybody knows it, so it is worth saying once at the start rather than policing later.
This is the best game on the page for a room with a wide age range, because the songs are the one thing a nine-year-old and a grandparent both know all the words to.
Two Truths and a Christmas
Players 4–12Time 15 minYou need nothing
The old icebreaker aimed at one day of the year, and it turns out that everybody has a strange one.
Each player tells three short stories about a Christmas they have actually had. Two are true. One is invented on the spot.
The room votes on which is the invention. Everyone who guesses right scores a point; the teller scores a point for every person who guesses wrong.
That scoring is what keeps the lies plausible. An absurd lie fools nobody and earns nothing, so the best play is a lie shaped exactly like your real family.
Play it early in the evening. It is the fastest way to find out that the quiet person at the end of the table once spent Christmas Day in an airport.
Guess the Carol
Players 6–20Time 10 minYou need nothing
A carol hummed with the mouth shut, and a room discovering that it knows twenty of these and can identify none of them.
One player picks a carol and hums it. Mouth closed — no words, no la-la-la, no conducting with the hands.
First correct shout takes a point and hums the next one.
A hummer who has not been guessed inside a minute must say the title, and loses the point. That rule stops anybody choosing something nobody in the room has heard of.
Ban the opening line after two rounds. Everyone starts on the same four notes, and the game gets far better the moment the beginning is off the table.
Ten Seconds of Christmas
Players 4–20Time 10 minYou need nothing
Name ten things in a category in ten seconds, out loud, while the whole room counts down at you.
One player is given a category: reindeer, films with snow in them, things in a Christmas dinner, excuses for leaving a work party early.
Ten seconds to name ten. The room counts down out loud, and that counting is the entire difficulty — done in silence the game is easy and dull.
Repeats do not count. The room rules on them instantly and without discussion, because a debate costs more time than the round is worth.
Categories are invented on the spot by whoever is sitting to the speaker’s right. That saves the host preparing anything and makes the categories considerably worse, which is the point.
The Worst Present
Players 4–15Time 15 minYou need nothing
Everybody has received one. The game is working out whose was worst, and it is rarely the person who volunteers first.
Each player describes, in under a minute, the worst present they have ever been given. Real ones only.
Nobody names the giver if the giver is in the building, or on their way to it. This is a party, not a reckoning.
When everyone has spoken the room votes — but not on the worst object. It votes on the worst moment: the present, plus the face that had to be made while holding it.
The winner chooses the next game. It is the only prize this page offers and people take it surprisingly seriously.
Who Am I?
Players 4–20Time 15 minYou need sticky notes, a pen
A name stuck to your forehead that you cannot see, and twenty questions to work out whose it is.
Each player writes a Christmas figure on a sticky note — someone from a film, a carol, an advert, a story — and sticks it to the forehead of the person on their left without showing them.
Going round the circle, each player asks one yes-or-no question about themselves. A yes buys another question straight away; a no passes the turn on.
You may guess your own name at any point, but a wrong guess costs the rest of that turn.
One rule makes it a party game rather than a quiz: the names have to be things everyone in this room would know. A clever obscure choice is a dead turn for the player wearing it and a boring one for everybody watching.
The Twelve Days Memory Round
Players 4–12Time 10 minYou need nothing
The structure of the song with the list invented by the room, and it collapses at about day eight every single time.
The first player begins “on the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me” and invents the gift. Anything at all; the more specific the harder it is to remember.
The second player repeats the first and adds a second. The third repeats both and adds a third, on to twelve.
One mistake and that player is out. The list carries on from where it was, and the last player standing wins.
Every gift has to be said in the rhythm of the song rather than simply listed. It sounds like a detail. It is the reason the game is difficult.
The One-Word Christmas Speech
Players 5–12Time 15 minYou need nothing
The room delivers a speech to the nation one word at a time, going clockwise, and nobody has any idea where it is heading.
Everyone sits in a circle. One player names the occasion: a toast, an address to the nation, an apology to the turkey, a statement to the press.
The speech is built one word at a time round the circle. No planning, no whispering, nobody takes two words.
Anybody may end it by saying “and a happy new year”, which finishes the speech wherever it happens to have got to.
The first two are nonsense and the fourth is unnervingly good. That is the whole game, so do not let the room stop at two.
Christmas Charades
Players 6–20Time 20 minYou need paper, a bowl
Charades with everything in the bowl written by the room, which is why it beats any printed list of titles.
Everyone writes three Christmas things on separate scraps and folds them into a bowl — films, carols, traditions, adverts, family disasters. Nobody signs anything.
Two teams. A player draws a scrap and acts it: no words, no sound, no pointing at objects in the room.
Sixty seconds a turn. A correct guess takes the scrap and a point; a pass costs nothing, but the clock keeps running.
Because the room filled the bowl, everything in it is something this room has actually seen. If you would rather draw from a longer list, there are 200 charades ideas here, with the standard signals.
Christmas Card Pictionary
Players 6–20Time 20 minYou need paper, pens
The same idea drawn rather than acted, and it is the better version for a room that will not stand up.
Two teams, one pad, one pen, one minute. A player draws a Christmas scene, film or carol while their own team guesses.
No letters, no numbers, no speaking and no gestures. The pen is the only thing allowed to move.
A point per correct guess. Keep the drawings — the wall of them at the end of the night is funnier than the game was.
It works in the rooms where charades does not: a table that has eaten too much to get up, a party with somebody who will not perform, an office where standing on a chair is not going to happen.
The Roll of Tape
Players 2–12Time 5 minYou need a roll of sticky tape
The smallest game on this page: find the end of the tape, against the clock, with everyone watching.
Press the end of a roll of sticky tape down flat so it vanishes into the roll.
Pass it round. Each player gets fifteen seconds to find the end and lift it clear. Whoever manages it wins.
If the first round proves too easy, play the second with the lights off, or with one hand held behind the back.
It takes ninety seconds, costs nothing and fits the exact moment when a room has gone quiet and nobody wants to commit to a whole game.
Wrap Battle
Players 4–16Time 10 minYou need wrapping paper, tape, odd objects
Wrapping a present is a skill nobody practises and everybody claims. Two minutes settles the argument.
Each player gets an awkwardly shaped object, a sheet of paper, tape and two minutes.
The variation that turns it into a game: only your weaker hand may work. Both hands may hold the object still, but the wrong one does all the cutting, folding and taping.
At two minutes everybody stops and the room judges on looks alone, with no explanations accepted from the wrapper.
Use things that are genuinely difficult — a mug, a bunch of bananas, a rolled-up jumper, a bicycle pump. A box is not a contest.
Baubles and Chopsticks
Players 4–16Time 5 minYou need baubles, chopsticks, two bowls
A minute, a pair of chopsticks and a pile of baubles, which is far less easy than it sounds and considerably louder.
Two bowls a metre apart, one of them full of baubles. One minute to move as many as possible from one to the other with chopsticks.
One hand only, and a dropped bauble stays exactly where it lands.
With a big room, run it as a relay in teams of four. It goes from a contest to a spectacle and everybody gets to shout.
Shatterproof baubles. This is not a precaution, it is the difference between a game and an evening spent hoovering.
White Elephant Gift Exchange
Players 6–30Time 30–45 minYou need one wrapped gift per person
The gift exchange where nothing is yours until the round ends. The version below is the one that actually finishes.
Everybody brings one wrapped gift to an agreed price cap and puts it in a pile. Draw numbers from a hat to set the order.
Player one takes a gift and opens it. From then on each player either opens a new gift from the pile or steals an opened one. Anyone stolen from immediately does the same thing: opens or steals.
Three rules stop it running all night. A gift may be stolen twice and is then frozen for good. Nobody may steal straight back from the person who has just taken from them. When the last gift is opened, player one gets one final steal, and the game ends there.
Agree the cap out loud before anybody shops, and say plainly whether the gifts are meant to be good or meant to be terrible. Half the arguments at a white elephant come from a room that never decided which of the two games it was playing.
Secret Santa Detective
Players 6–25Time 20 minYou need the gifts you already have
A second game hidden inside the one the office is already playing, at no extra cost and no extra shopping.
Open the Secret Santa presents one at a time, in front of everybody, rather than all at once in a heap.
After each one the recipient gets a single guess at who gave it. Right, and the recipient takes a point. Wrong, and the giver takes one and stays hidden.
Nobody confirms anything until every gift has been opened. Then the givers own up in order and the points are counted.
It fixes the awkward part of Secret Santa — one person unwrapping something while twenty people watch and think of nothing to say — by making that the part everybody is concentrating on.
Pass the Parcel, Adult Version
Players 6–20Time 15 minYou need a parcel, music
The children’s game with the sweets swapped for instructions, which makes it a completely different game.
Wrap something small in a lot of layers. Between each layer put a folded instruction instead of a sweet.
The instructions escalate. The first is “tell the room one true thing about your year”; the fourth is “make a toast”; the last is a forfeit worth having. Write all of them before you start — nobody invents a good one under pressure with a room watching.
Music plays, the parcel goes round, the music stops, one layer comes off and the instruction is carried out before the music starts again.
Whoever unwraps the last layer keeps what is inside, so make it something worth keeping. The game is noticeably better when the prize is real.
The Cracker Joke Contest
Players 4–20Time 10 minYou need crackers, or paper
The jokes inside crackers are famously terrible. This is the round where the room tries to do better and finds out that it cannot.
Pull the crackers and read every joke out, worst first if the table can agree which that is.
Each player then writes one cracker joke of their own on the back of a slip, folds it and drops it into a hat.
Read them all out anonymously. The room votes for the best one — and then, separately, for the one that is most convincingly a real cracker joke. Those are two different prizes and the second is the funnier of them.
With no crackers in the house, scraps of paper do the job. The jokes will be just as bad.
Silent Night
Players 8–40Time runs all eveningYou need nothing
One word is banned for the whole party, and the only thing at stake is who catches whom. Set this one up before anybody arrives.
Choose a word nobody could reasonably avoid — Christmas, present, cheers — and tell each person as they come through the door.
Anybody who says it and is caught hands over something small: a bauble, a coin, a cracker toy. Whoever is holding the most at midnight wins.
The catcher has to say the word out loud to claim the forfeit. A catch that nobody else heard does not count, which keeps the whole thing honest without a referee.
It runs in the background for hours, needs no host and nothing bought, and it is the only game here you can start before a single guest has taken their coat off.
Indoor Snowball Fight
Players 6–30Time 5 minYou need scrap paper
A minute of indoor chaos with nothing at all at risk, which is the right way to end an evening.
Every player gets five sheets of scrap paper and crumples them into balls. Split the room in two with a line of tape, or a sofa.
Sixty seconds. Throw everything across the line. When the time is up, the side with fewer balls on its own floor wins.
Nothing may be held back and nothing may be kicked. The counting is done by somebody who was not playing, because both sides will otherwise count wrong and mean it.
It is the loudest game here, it takes four minutes including the clearing up, and it is the one people describe to other people afterwards.
