Family Group Games

Charades

• Charades, a classic family game, is enjoyable for all ages and for groups of four or more. Contestants usually act out movie titles for their teammates to guess. Tailor the game to your family's needs; your game can feature animal species and popular magazines as potential answers.

  A classic variation is Pictionary, in which the contestants attempt to draw a picture representing the mystery answer. Pictionary also allows for more esoteric categories, such as famous people, food and countries.

Bingo

• Best for large numbers (at least five suggested), bingo requires no skill and so is appropriate for all ages. Use simple prizes such as candy bars, and keep playing until everyone wins at least once. If you do not have a bingo set, you can easily make one o a computer in Excel or the OpenOffice equivalent by using a random number generator. Simply draw a five-by-five grid and create random numbers to fill the grid.

Telephone Oracle

• Telephone oracle is a parlor game that requires only a pencil and piece of paper, played with upward of five people arranged in a ring. One person takes the paper and writes a question, which can be silly or serious. The next person writes a plausible answer to the question and folds the paper so that the original question is no longer visible, before passing it on to the next person. That person writes a plausible question for the answer they see, before folding the paper again and passing it on. The game ends when the end of the paper is reached, with the final "answer" being the ultimate "oracle" to the original question.

Plenty Questions

• Plenty Questions, a variant on the classic guessing game Twenty Questions, requires no special equipment at all. One person chooses a subject, whether a real object or person or something insubstantial, such as the color blue. The other contestants take turns in guessing. The answerer must choose whether the current answer is better than the current "best" answer.

  For instance, a sample question might be: "Is it closer to an elephant or closer to the color blue?" If the answer was really "donkey," then the answerer would have to say "closer to an elephant" because an elephant is an animal. The game ends when the answer is reached.