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Family Charades Ideas

In charades, words, ideas and phrases are represented in pantomime, with the aid of only a few symbols. The object of the game is to guess, sometimes syllable by syllable, what is being represented. Word and phrase ideas are limited only by your imagination and willingness to perform in front of a small crowd. The game itself dates back at least as far as the publication of William Makepeace Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," where it appeared in 1848.

Celebrities
- Over-sized personalities make good party fodder. Fictional characters like Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins and Darth Vader, or political figures like Bill Clinton, Sarah Palin and Barak Obama provide plenty to identify with in this regard. For example, once you have established the category, you can convey to your teammates "Barack Obama" by pretending to be a bear, then a rock. "Bear" plus "rock" gives you "Barack,"which is halfway to scoring your team a point. Because of a president's notoriety, people will be more likely to connect "bear" and "rock" in this way.
Topics
- Make your topic specific. The meaning of life will be hard to tackle. By comparison, mowing the lawn will be manageable. Proven topics: sailing a ship around the world; running for office; graduation, and winning a million dollars. "Running for office" can be acted by, of course, running. You can then help teammates connect "running" to "office" by answering imaginary phones and rifling through imaginary papers and file folders.
Film
- Movies are miming gold; vivid and virtually endless in scope, movies are a ready-made menu of performance ideas, characters and phrases. Teammates can identify Pinocchio, for example, by an extension of the hand from the nose. Act like a marionette for added effect. Other ideas are Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Scooby-Doo, Finding Nemo, Dracula, a Christmas Carol, Spartacus, 300, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Aim for variety. Television and theater are also fair game.
Music
- Draw your ideas from songs, musical groups and musicals. Classic musicals include: The Sound of Music; Phantom of the Opera; Les Miserables, and Rent and Wicked. The musical groups to parody are the Backstreet Boys, the Pussy Cat Dolls, the Spice Girls, Milli Vanilli, MC Hammer and 'N Sync. Some time-honored tunes you can portray include Stairway to Heaven (Led Zepplin), Hotel California (The Eagles), Like a Rolling Stone (Bob Dylan), Hey Jude (The Beatles), Gimme Shelter (The Rolling Stones) and Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen).

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