Best Family Christmas Games

One of the best ways to pass the time in the run-up to Christmas is a well-rounded game night. However, tried and tested board games may not be enough to draw the family together. However, board games are not the only way to keep your family entertained through the wintry nights of December. Here are several games that will bring fresh excitement into family game night.

Two Truths and a Lie

This game has a dead-simple concept: a player is given a topic, and has to tell two truths and a lie about themselves in relation to that topic. Other players must guess which of the three statements is false, and the player who guesses correctly the most times wins. You can customise the game to feature Christmas-related topics, such as ‘the worst gifts I have ever received’ or ‘the strangest thing to happen to me on Christmas.’ To ensure scoring isn’t too messy, you may wish to divide the family into two teams, with the person making the statements in each team rotating as the topic changes.

Blindfolded Christmas drawing

To pull off this game, you will need copious amounts of paper plates, felt-tip pens, and blindfolds. Each participant is blindfolded, and then told to draw a Christmas scene on the paper plate. Once the participants are done, they then vote on who has done the best job, and after several rounds, the person voted the best blind artist wins. When telling the participants what to draw, the person in charge should describe one element of the scene at a time, for instance telling the participants to draw a tree, then some presents, and Santa. Make sure to pack extra paper plates for extra rounds, and have fun!

The Christmas Quiz

One of the most versatile games in this list, the Christmas quiz can take very many directions, from being a quiz on Christmas films, to being about Christmas foods, carols, and other Christmas-related topics. You may choose to not only do the quiz in the tired written format, but to also use pictures and audio to prompt the participants to guess what the respective images or sounds represent, adding some variety to the quiz experience.

Pin the Nose on the Reindeer

In this holiday rendition of the Pin the Tail on the Donkey game, each player is given a red nose with a sharp object driven through it, blindfolded, spun around, and then tasked with finding the paper reindeer on the wall, to which they must attach the nose. The person with the nose placement closest to the reindeer’s actual nose wins. This can provide an evening full of entertainment as each player stumbles around the room searching for the coveted reindeer.

Christmas Pictionary

Like regular Pictionary, the game involves two teams vying to guess what a chosen person has drawn on the board. To choose what the chosen person will draw, you may make them take a random piece of paper from one of several containers: each container would contain things within a broad category, e.g. Christmas carols or Christmas films. For each broad category, set a score limit. Once a team reaches the score limit, they score one point, and the team that has scored the most points overall wins the game.

Snowball Toss

This is a relatively simple and accessible game for all ages. You will need a wreath, a bucket, some fishing line, lots of marshmallows, and access to a corridor. Use the fishing line to hang the wreath in a corridor dorway, and place the bucket some distance into the corridor, on the other side of the wreath. Then, take turns throwing ten marshmallows into the bucket, through the hoop of the wreath. Whoever gets the most marshmallows in the bucket wins the game. This game can be modified to be more difficult by moving the bucket, changing the bucket’s size, or by changing the ammunition into ping pong balls, which are significantly harder to get into a bucket than marshmallows.

Guess the Bells

For this game, you will need several cardboard boxes (preferably of the same size), some gift wrap, some labels, and a copious number of jingle bells. Fill each box with a different number of jingle bells, taking note of how many jingle bells you have put in. Then, gift wrap the boxes and label them randomly using the labels. Get each player (or team!) to arrange the boxes in the order of containing the least bells to containing the most; they are allowed to rattle the box to try and guess how many bells each box contains. The person or team who has come up with the most accurate size order wins.