Christmas Game Night

Are you looking for the next big hit for your Christmas party this year? Look no further, because this is Christmas Game Night!

I created Christmas Game Night for my family seven years ago and it’s been a favorite and a hit ever since.

This game consists of 11 mini games played by two competing teams and runs like a TV game show. Games vary from relay races, guessing games, puzzles to solve, charades, etc. All the games are fairly short and simple, but a lot of fun. Christmas Game Night is always a big party hit and I know you will have a great time with it!

Christmas Game Night is also very versatile because of its format. I’ve created Christmas Game Night as a PowerPoint presentation, so you can open the file and edit/delete/add anything you’d like. Download the Christmas Game Night PowerPoint presentation and the separate instruction sheet here: But keep reading to learn all the tricks of the trade.

Let’s get ready to play!

First, pick a location.

Your location needs to be a fairly big space. You need a large floor space, a kitchen table, and seating for all your players.

Depending on the home I’ve played this game in, sometimes we switch between a few rooms based on our needs. Mostly we gather and play in the family room around the TV, but might move to the kitchen for table games or basement for relay races as necessary.

Most importantly, you need a screen big enough for everyone to see and read clearly. I always use a TV that has an HDMI port so I can connect my laptop to it. PowerPoint, the program the official game is in, has a setting where you can project the slides onto a second screen but keep notes and things on your original screen, which is my preferred choice.

If you really, really don’t want to use a screen, then it’s totally possible to write out all the PowerPoint slides onto poster boards or sheets of paper and hold them up manually as needed (especially have an Assistant on hand if this is the route you’re going). But be aware that you’ll need to have all of that stuff prepared and ready beforehand. Honestly, the PowerPoint is complete and ready to go this very moment, so I suggest making things easier on yourself and just using that. But to each his own.

Second, gather supplies.

Review the games you want to play and make a list of supplies you’ll need. Gather everything in one bin to keep on hand for game-play. I have a plastic shoebox in my Christmas storage stuff strictly for Christmas Game Night supplies (not including perishable candy, obviously). I’ll list the supplies needed per game, so keep reading.

Besides game supplies, you’ll also need some kind of scoreboard. I like to use a whiteboard because I can easily set it upright on a chair or something so everyone can see it at all times, but a simple paper and pencil also does the job, as does someone’s Notepad app on their phone.

Third, select your players.

To play you need the following people present:

1. The Host. That’s you, whoever is reading this. I invented these games, so naturally I know how to play them and, more importantly, I know all the correct answers, so I’m always the Host. The Host’s job is to instruct everyone how to play, make sure the rules are followed, and keep score. The Host doesn’t actually play any of the games (because I already know all the correct answers, remember?). This game is supposed to mimic a TV game show, so channel your inner Bob Barker and have a good time.
2. The Assistant. Almost every time I’ve played Christmas Game Night, there’s at least one person who doesn’t want to play and just wants to watch. This is the perfect person to commandeer into being The Assistant (if they’re willing, of course; I don’t believe in pressuring anyone to play if they don’t want to, and if they really want to sit on the sidelines and just watch, then there’s no harm in that). The Assistant can keep score, pass out game supplies, and click through the slides per the direction of the Host. Yes, all these things can easily be done by the Host, but it’s nice to have a second pair of eyes, especially when counting points on fast games.
3. Players. You need teams of 3-5 people, meaning you need 6-10 people total to play. Divide your players into two equally-matched teams.

A note about picking players to play Christmas Game Night:

First, this is not a toddler game and I suggest players be no younger than about ten-ish. Besides needing to be able to read well, some of these games also require plenty of background knowledge, so small children might be frustrated by some of these games. I strongly suggest playing with preteen-and-older players.

On a happier note, many of these games can easily be modified for a younger audience. Remember, you can download and edit the PowerPoint as needed. For younger kids, only choose a few games to play (the younger the kid, the shorter the attention span) and focus on the physical relay races, blowing the cottonball, and passing the ornament, that kind of stuff. Leave the clue-giving and guessing games to the adults.

Second, trust me when I say to limit your team sizes to no more than about five. I’m speaking from experience here. Five people per team means that everyone gets plenty of turns to participate and turns are short enough to still keep the whole group engaged. Plus, it’s much easier to find a living room that seats ten than it is to seat twenty.

There was only one occasion where I unsuccessfully attempted playing Christmas Game Night and it was largely due to the huge group that we had, which was about 10 people per team. It was hard to keep such a large group’s attention, especially when it wasn’t their turn, and there were too many distractions and side conversations going on. So we cut the game short and only played a couple games before it petered out.

Remember, Christmas Game Night requires players who can pay attention, follow directions, and be involved long-term.

Third, only play with people who like games and who actually want to play. I know this sounds obvious, but seriously.

My younger brother once borrowed my Christmas Game Night to play with his high school friends, but he told me that the evening was only mostly fun. Again, he said that his group was too big, but worse was that he had too many distracted and uninterested players. Too many people were chatting, missing instructions, and ignoring the game completely to play on their phones (absolutely no phones allowed at Christmas Game Night! Be involved and have fun!). Those kinds of players kind of wreck things for their team.

Know your crowd before you suggest Christmas Game Night. Not everyone likes games, and that’s fine. Again, this is a pretty long and involved game, so play with others who are interested and willing to actually participate. Christmas Game Night is a blast and can be the highlight of your Christmas party, but only if your players allow it to be.

Now that you have your location, your supplies, and your players, it’s time to play Christmas Game Night!

You can find the instructions and the PowerPoint presentation in the downloads above, but I’ll also describe each of the eleven games below. Get ready to play!

Game 1: Christmas Categories

Supplies:

• Timer
• Screen with category clues

This game is essentially the same as Password.

Each team chooses one player to be It. On your team’s turn, your It will sit with his/her back to the screen (no peeking!).

Set the timer for 1 minute. Team members will list items in the secret category WITHOUT saying any part of the listed word or phrase. The It player must guess the category. Guess as many categories as you can in one minute and earn 1 point for each correct guess. Teams take turns guessing until all 25 categories have been correctly guessed.

Example: “Types of winter clothing”

Team members would shout out, “Coat! Gloves! Hat! Scarf!” etc. until It says the correct category.

Note to the Host: Be generous. This is supposed to be fun, so if the It player gets the answer mostly right, I like to be lenient and give it to them. Something like “Clothes you wear in winter” would be acceptable to me because you’ve got the correct idea, where “Types of clothes you put on a snowman” would not. But you’re the Host, after all, so it’s your call.

25 Categories:

1. Ghosts who visit Scrooge
2. Types of winter clothing
3. Things you hang up at Christmas time
4. Christmas foods
5. Things you’d find in Santa’s workshop
6. Ways to say “Merry Christmas”
7. Christmas/winter animals
8. Live-action Christmas movies
9. People from the Nativity
10. Ways to wrap a gift
11. Things to put on a gingerbread house
12. Christmas things that are red
13. Parts of the “12 Days of Christmas” song
14. Songs about snow or cold weather
15. Kinds of Christmas candy
16. Things you tell Santa Claus
17. Animated Christmas movies
18. Things you put on a Christmas tree
19. Christmas things that are green
20. Things Santa Claus tells you
21. Kinds of Christmas decorations
22. Songs about Santa Claus
23. Names of Santa’s reindeer
24. Winter sports
25. Christmas hymns

Game 2: Snowball Blowout

Supplies:

• 2 red solo cups
• Blue painters tape
• 1 cottonball (aka snowball) per player
• Table
• Timer

Tape the 2 red solo cups dangling off the edge of a table, one for each team. All players line up in two lines across from their team’s cup.

Set the timer for two minutes. One at a time, players (from both teams) must blow their snowball across the table to drop into their team’s cup. Players may NOT touch their snowballs in any way. If they miss and their snowball falls off the table, they can pick it up and go to the back of their team’s line to try again.

At the end of the timer, both teams get two points for every snowball successfully blown into their cup.

Game 3: Roll a Snowman

Supplies:

• Timer
• 2 sheets of paper
• 2 pencils
• 2 dice

Give both teams one sheet of paper, one pencil, and one die. Set the timer for 30 seconds.

Teams, roll your die and draw the snowman part correlating to the number you rolled, trying to build an entire snowman.

The first team to roll all six numbers and draw their entire snowman shouts, “Done!” and is awarded 3 points. If neither team finishes before the timer runs out, both teams win 1/4 point per each completed snowman part.

If you roll a:

1. Draw a hat
2. Draw a head
3. Draw a middle body
4. Draw a bottom body
5. Draw a face
6. Draw stick arms

Game 4: Candy Clues

Supplies:

• Ten pictures of the insides of various candy bars

I said above that if you don’t want to use the screen and/or my PowerPoint slides, most of these games can be written out and held up on sheets of paper. But not so much with Candy Clues.

To make this game, I bought ten different kinds of candy bars, cut them in half, and took a picture of their cross-sections. Then I put those pictures into Photoshop, turned them black and white, inverted the colors, and then cranked up the contrast all the way. The resulting pictures are what you see in the PowerPoint game. If you don’t want to use my pictures, you are welcome to recreate them in your own way, but it will be that much more work for you.

The Host will display one picture of a candy bar. Teams will take turns giving ONE guess as to what candy bar is pictured. If they guess correctly, they get four points. Move to the next picture, beginning with the opposite team.

If they guess incorrectly, play moves to the other team who can steal with ONE guess (again for four points). Keep going back and forth between teams until the candy bar is correctly identified.

Note: imagine Family Feud for this one where the Host moves down the row and every player gets to give an answer. For each team’s guess, they must likewise rotate players so that the same player isn’t guessing every single candy bar, giving everyone a turn.

The pictured candy bars:

1. Kitkat
2. Hershey’s Cookies and Cream
3. Almond Joy
4. Milky Way
5. Twix
6. Crunch
7. 3 Musketeers
8. 100 Grand
9. Snickers
10. Baby Ruth

Game 5: Deck the Halls

Supplies:

• 2 stockings
• 6 plastic, shatterproof ornaments
• Large floor space

Give each team 1 stocking and 3 ornaments. Both teams select one designated Stocking-Holder. Everyone else line up behind their Holder.

The first person in line (the Stocking Holder is the last) must pick up off the floor one ornament using ONLY his/her elbows; have players put their hands behind their heads so their elbows stick out, chicken-wing style. Then pass the ornament to the next player, who again can only grab the ornament using his/her elbows. Pass the ornament down the line of players and finally drop it into the stocking held by the Stocking Holder.

ALL ornaments must be passed to ALL players using only elbows. NO CHEATING! If an ornament is dropped at any time, it has to be sent back to the front of the line and start over (this is a great game to have an Assistant for, to watch the second team and pick up any dropped ornaments while the Host does so for the first team).

The first team to put all three ornaments into their stocking wins 5 points.

Game 6: Christmas Carol Charades

Supplies:

• Timer
• Slips of paper with various Christmas song titles written on them
• Something to hold paper slips, either a Santa hat or a stocking

I wrote out 34 Christmas carols for this game on the below document. You can download it and cut out the paper strips, or you are welcome to write your own. But seriously, the work is already done for you right here:

Teams take turns choosing an It. Set the timer for one minute, during which the It player will draw a slip of paper and act out the Christmas song for team members to guess–NO SPEAKING ALLOWED. Act out and guess as many songs as you can before the timer goes off. Teams get 6 points for every correctly-guessed carol.

Then play moves to the other team. Continue taking turns until all Christmas carols have been guessed.

Game 7: Christmas Phrase Unscramble

Supplies:

• 18 Christmas phrases scrambled up

This is not a turn-taking game.

The Host will put up one scrambled Christmas phrase. All players can shout out the correct answer at any time. Whichever player correctly guesses the phrase earns their team 7 points. Keep playing until all 18 phrases have been correctly unscrambled.

Note: Like the Candy Clues game, the scrambled-up phrases are already in my PowerPoint and so I won’t list them here again, but you are welcome to make your own on paper if you’d like.

To make the game easier, I scrambled each individual word, not the entire phrase, so it reads: “dan ish mean lalsh eb dalcel frudwelno” which unscrambles to “And his name shall be called wonderful.” Get it?

Phrases I scrambled:

1. And his name shall be called wonderful
2. Have yourself a merry little Christmas
3. Merry Christmas
4. God bless us every one
5. It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth
6. Good will toward men
7. Happy holidays
8. Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight
9. Peace on earth
10. We wish you a Merry Christmas
11. His heart was two sizes too small
12. Tis the season
13. Bah humbug
14. Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer
15. Twas the night before Christmas
16. Feliz Navidad
17. You’ll shoot your eye out
18. Lights at Temple Square

Game 8: Stocking Stuffers

Supplies:

• Timer
• 2 stockings
• 2 plastic spoons
• M&Ms candy (or other small candy)
• An open bowl to hold the candy in
• Large floor space

This is a relay race.

Each team choose one Stocking Holder, who will stand at the far side of the race area. All other players stand at the opposite end of the area.

Set the timer for 3 minutes. One at a time, one player per team will scoop a spoonful of candy with his/her team’s plastic spoon and take it to his/her Stocking Holder and dump it in the stocking. Return to his/her team and pass the spoon to the next player to continue the game. Any dropped candy cannot be retrieved.

At the end of three minutes, teams count the number of candies in their stockings. The winning team gets 8 points for every candy piece MORE than the losing team.

Note: I most often buy the massive M&M bag for this game and have players scoop directly out of the bag. It makes things a little more intense and funnier to have the two opposing players fighting to get their spoon in the bag faster than the other. Or if you’d rather make it easier, divide the M&Ms equally into two separate bowls (plastic, so if it gets knocked off it won’t break), one for each team.

Make it harder: set up chairs (or something like it) that players must zigzag around to get to their Stocking Holder on the other side.

Game 9: Christmas Timeline

Supplies:

• 2 sets of 10 printed pictures of Christmas movie posters in envelopes
• Timer

Prep: Collect and print 10 Christmas movie poster pictures. My pictures are all in black and white and are half-paper sized. Mine are in a Word document that you can view and print here:

Give both teams one envelope. DO NOT open the envelope until the timer has started (and don’t give any hints or clues as to what is inside the envelopes). Simply instruct players to arrange the contents of their envelopes in order.

Set the timer for one minute. When the timer starts, teams will open their envelopes and arrange the movie pictures in order from earliest to latest.

When a team thinks they have the correct order, shout, “Done!” and the Host will check their answers. While checking, the other team may continue ordering their set.

If a team gets the entire order of movies correct before the timer runs out, they get 9 points. If neither team finishes before the timer ends, both teams will be awarded 1/2 point for every correctly-ordered item.

These are the ten movies I chose and their correct order, by year they were released:

1. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
2. Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
3. Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)
4. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)
5. Mr. Krueger’s Christmas (1980)
6. A Christmas Story (1983)
7. Home Alone (1990)
8. The Santa Clause (1994)
9. Elf (2003)
10. The Polar Express (2004)

Feel free to add to/take away from this list based on your players’ knowledge base. I originally created this game for my own family so I chose movies that my family knows and loves.

Game 10: Crack the Carol Code

Supplies:

• 2 worksheets (download below)
• 2 pencils
• Timer

Give both teams a worksheet (face down) and a pencil. DO NOT look at the worksheet until the timer has begun.

Set the timer for 3 minutes. Teams will work together to crack the code and decipher the hidden Christmas carols. At the end of the timer, both teams get 10 points for every correctly-guessed answer.

Note: You can make this game harder by shortening the timer to two minutes, or have teams choose only one player who must complete the worksheet alone.

20 Secret Codes and Answers:

1. Bleached Yule — White Christmas
2. Castaneous-colored Seed Vesticated in a Conflagration — Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire
3. Singular Yearning for the Twin Anterior Incisors — All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth.
4. Righteous Darkness — Oh Holy Night
5. Arrival Time: 2400 Hours; Weather: Cloudless — It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
6. Loyal Followers Advance — Oh Come, All Ye Faithful
7. Far Off in a Feeder — Away in a Manger
8. Array the Corridor — Deck the Halls
9. Small Male Percussionist — Little Drummer Boy
10. Monarchial Triad — We Three Kings
11. Nocturnal Noiselessness — Silent Night
12. Jehovah Calm Down the Happy Tender Males — God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
13. Red Man en Route to Small City — Santa Claus is Coming to Town
14. Frozen Precipitation Commence — Let it Snow
15. Proceed and Enlighten on the Pinnacle — Go Tell it on a Mountain
16. The Quadruped with the Vermillion Proboscis — Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
17. Query Regarding Identity of Descendant — What Child is This
18. Delight for this Planet — Joy to the World
19. Give Attention to the Melodious Celestial Beings — Hark! The Herald Angels Sings
20. The Dozen Festive 24 Hour Intervals — The Twelve Days of Christmas

Game 11: Defend Christmas!

Supplies:

• 30 red solo cups (regular or mini size) (or get the festive green ones; we’re building a Christmas tree, after all)
• Ping pong balls
• Ping pong paddles
• Table

Teams choose a Builder. Both Builders stand on the far end of the table and are given a stack of 15 solo cups. One cup, randomly placed in the stack, has a star drawn on it.

Builders must race to stack their cups into a Christmas-tree pyramid with 5 cups on the bottom, then 4, 3, 2, and finally the cup with the star must go on the very top. The first Builder to complete his/her cup pyramid wins.

Meanwhile, give all other players one ping pong paddle and ping pong ball per player. All other players stand opposite of the builders. Players can use their paddles to hit their ping pong balls and try to knock down their opponent’s cup pyramid at any time during building. They must chase and retrieve their own gone-astray ping pong balls. Ping pong balls can ONLY be fired from the far end of the table–NO CHEATING!

Note: To win, your pyramid doesn’t have to remain standing for any length of time, just exist at some point whole and standing. Every time I’ve played this, the winning pyramid only stands for a fraction of a second before getting pummeled by a ping pong ball. You have to trust your Builders in this game to be honest and say if their pyramid was actually complete or not.

A few variations:

If you have small teams, I suggest a paddle for everyone. However, if you have large teams I suggest giving each team one paddle; each player may attempt one hit and then they must pass their paddle to the next player on their team.

You can use either large or small solo cups. Large ones take longer to stack, but tend to be a little sturdier. Mini cups stack faster because you don’t have to reach as far to stack them, but they are more easily blasted away by ping pong balls.

Make it harder: if you have experienced ping pong players who have no problem hitting the target fast and hard every single time, you can slow them down by making the rule that all ping pong balls must bounce on the table at least once before hitting any cups.

And thus ends Christmas Game Night!

Tally up the final scores, hand out a prize to the winners, and then everyone enjoy a Christmasy treat together.

I very much hope you enjoy Christmas Game Night.

Download all the suggested files for these games here: