Good Charades Topics

How to Play Charades

• Divide the players into two teams. Have each team write down several phrases on slips of paper for the other team. Each team will place their topics in a bowl or hat. One player draws a slip of paper from his team's topics and reads it to himself. That player will then use gestures and body language to attempt to convey to his team what was written on the paper. Speaking and props are not permitted. A timer is used to limit the amount of time the team has to guess. Choose a time limit based on the players' skills as young children may need more time. Once the topic is successfully guessed or the time runs out, the other team takes a turn. The winning team is the one with the most successful guesses when the topics have all be attempted.

Charades Topics for Kids

• If you are playing with kids, try to keep the topics simple and easy to express. Remember to keep the topics within the range of their experiences. For example, kids probably have not read many of the books or seen the movies that adults have. Try to choose topics relating to everyday activities. Examples of this might be driving a car, mowing the lawn or taking a shower. Other good topics for kids are sports-related topics, such as playing baseball or soccer. With older children, make the topics a little more specific. For example "playing baseball" might become "hitting a home run" instead.

Charades Topics for Adults

• Good charades topics for adults should be more difficult to guess but not impossible to act out using only gestures. Book, movie and song titles are all good choices, but be sure to choose popularly known options rather than obscure ones. For example, the famous book and movie, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," is a good choice because the flying, the bird, and the number one can all be expressed using gestures. Charades topics can be of any length, but those with more words can be easier to solve since the acting player can skip to the next word if struggling, and the other words in the topic may help to solve the entire phrase.

Choosing Charades Topics

• If you are having difficulty coming up with ideas for charades topics, follow these easy steps to come up with possibilities. First, choose a category. This can be books, movies, songs, occupations or activities. Next, choose a genre. Examples are comedies, kids' movies, classic rock, professional occupations or sports. Finally, decide on a difficulty level. If you have chosen the category of movies with kids' movies as the genre, you can either make it easy with a simple movie title like "Toy Story," or a more complex one like "The Emperor's New Groove."