By Lucy Corkhill
14th December 2013
Father Christmas Beard Game
If you don’t mind getting a bit messy – okay, very messy – then this is a hilarious game for two teams. Fill two baskets with cotton wool balls at one end of the room. At the other end of the room, get your teams ready by smearing the lower half of their faces with Vaseline (for a natural alternative, try Badger Balm). Set a timer depending on how many people you have in your team – give about 20 seconds per player – and then blow a whistle to start. Players run over to the cotton wool basket and bury their face in it, trying to get as many cotton balls to stick to their chin without using their hands. Then they run back to their team, and the next player goes over to the basket, continuing in a relay style until the timer goes off. The winning team are the ones with the most cotton wool balls still attached to their chins at the end of the game!
Guess who said that!
Make up a list of quirky questions to ask people – the kind of things you might not necessarily know about someone. These might include:
If you could eat one meal for the rest of your life what would it be?
Would you prefer to travel by boat, train or aeroplane?
If you could have dinner with a famous person, who would it be?
Would you prefer a bag of crisps or a box of chocolates?
What kind of weather conditions do you prefer: rainy and warm or sunny and cold?
If you had one superpower, what would it be?
What era in history would you most like to live in?
Appoint one member of your party as Question Asker and another as Guesser. Give everyone a piece of paper and a pen. When the Question Asker asks the question, everyone writes down their answer including the Question Asker (but not the Guesser). The Question Asker then gathers up all the answers and shuffles them before reading them out while the Guesser has a go at guessing who answered what. Then a new Question Asker and Guesser is appointed until everyone has had a go as Guesser. The winner is the Guesser who guesses the most right answers.
Alphabet Conversation
Another game for two teams. Everyone writes down a topic of conversation from hats to dogs – the sillier the better – and puts them all in a hat. Then one member of one team takes a topic from the hat and the other team gives them a letter of the alphabet to start from. The first team member must start the conversation from this letter and the following member replies with the next letter of the alphabet until you hopefully get round to the starting letter. So, if you had a conversation about dogs which started with the letter N, you might say ‘nine dogs I know have clairvoyant powers’, to which the next team member might reply ‘other dogs are only concerned with gnawing on bones’, to which the next could say ‘perhaps that’s because some dogs have smaller brains than others’ and so on.
Write a story using three letter words
Everyone can have a go at this game. Set a timer for several minutes and get everyone to write as long a story as they can using words containing three letters or less. So you might write: ‘The cat had no cod in his tea and it was a sad day for him. But his pal Dog had a bit of jam…’ and so on. Gosh, that was hard! If you think that’s the worst story you’ve ever read, you try it! Afterwards read your stories aloud to one another.
Draw what you hear
Split the group into two teams again. Have a blindfold, bowl of objects covered with a tea towel and pen and paper for each team. Set chairs back to back for each team. Get one member of each team to sit blindfolded in a chair facing one way with the covered basket of objects – this is the Describer. Another member of each team sits facing the other way with a pen and paper – the Artist. Then each blindfolded Describer selects one object from the covered basket and begins to describe it to the Artist who tries to draw what they hear. The round ends when the first Artist guesses what they’re drawing! Continue the game until each member of the team has had a go as Describer and Artist.
Guess the Christmas song
A simple but fun game for everyone. Designate someone to man the music player and get them to play a few notes of favourite Christmas songs or carols. Everyone else guesses what the song is, and if you want, who sang it. If you’re a family of music lovers you might even want to guess the year it came out!
The Chocolate Relay Game
Put a bar of chocolate in the fridge for a few hours before playing this game to ensure it’s really hard. You’ll need a big box of outdoor clothes including overcoats, gloves, scarves and hats, and a dice. Put the box of clothes at one end of the room and the bar of chocolate on a plate with a knife and fork at the other end. Everyone gathers at the clothes end of the room and takes turns rolling the dice. The first person to get a six must put on a coat, hat, gloves and scarf and leg it to the other side of the room. There they must try and eat the chocolate with the knife and fork until the next six is rolled, when they must run back and the person who rolled a six has to don the clothes and try and eat the chocolate…and so on. Hilarious fun, especially with little people and big gloves!
Find your Christmas song partner
This works with large groups of eight or more. Choose several popular Christmas songs or carols and write them down on pieces of paper, fold them, and put them in a hat. Make sure you repeat each song so that there are two slips of paper with the same song on them. As people arrive, get them to pick a piece of paper from the hat and keep it hidden. When you start the game, get everyone together in the largest room. Everyone starts singing (or, if you want to make it a bit harder, humming) their song at the same time and the idea is to find the other person in the room with the same song and team up with them. Perfect for families who like to make a lot of noise!
The Twelve Days Musical Chairs
Create a circle of chairs with one for everyone to sit on and allocate a Chair Remover. Give everyone a word/s from the carol ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ – such as partridge, French hens etc. (but not Five Gold Rings). Then get everyone to sing the carol together and when a participant’s word is sung, they have to stand up, turn around, and sit back down. Every time you get to Five Gold Rings everyone stands up and runs round all the chairs while the Chair Remover takes one chair out. Everyone then scurries for the remaining seats. The person who loses their seat then becomes Chair Remover so that the original CR gets a chance to join in! The winner is the one left with a seat at the end of the game!
