Are you looking to create some fun, long-lasting memories with your family or friends around the dinner table? Well, we’ve managed to compile a list of the best dinner table games that can help you change the rushed and routine dinner time into an event worth looking forward to every day.
At a Glance:
- Charade
- TableTopics
- Celebrity
- Secret Lines
- Goat Lords
- Detective
- Icebreaker
- Riddle Me This
- Telephone
Charade
It doesn’t get any more classic than Charade. If you haven’t played this game before with your family, you’re missing out on a great deal of fun. It’s a word-guessing game, basically, but with a very interesting catch. The catch is that talking isn’t allowed.
To play this game, the people around the dinner table must be divided into two teams. Each person must have a pen and paper handy on which they’ll be required to write a secret word or phrase. From there, you need to collect every slip of paper and separate them.
This is where the fun begins, each team has to guess the other team’s secret words or phrases. Okay, but how can you guess the word without being able to say anything? You act it out!
This takes place in an alternating fashion where one person from each team acts out the secret word without uttering a single word. The team members have three minutes to figure out the word being acted out. Several guesses can be shouted out until reaching the correct guess.
Each guess guarantees the team a point, and the team with the most points wins. Sounds like fun, huh? What’s even more fun is that Charade is divided into six different categories: movies, songs, TV shows, books, quotes, and plays.
It helps to motion the category to your teammates before acting out the secret word. You can also inform your teammates of how many syllables the word contains.
TableTopics
TableTopics is an excellent dinner table game to try if you want to engage your children in the art of conversation. The game revolves around asking age-appropriate questions that are very specific to children.
The questions pretty much cover everything, from silly questions to ones that require quite a bit of thinking. TableTopics isn’t just perfect around the dinner table, but at all times, really. You can play it with your child every day to encourage parent-child up-building conversation.
The game will also help your children learn about themselves, and who knows, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two about yourself as well. The pack consists of 135 different questions that will spark all kinds of conversation around the dinner table.
We also recommend checking out the TableTopics to GO version, which consists of 120 cards that revolve around three separate themes that your kids would love to learn about, namely, gratitude, five senses, and giant teeny tiny.
Celebrity
As the name implies, Celebrity is a game that tests your knowledge of pop culture. To play this game, you’ll need some post-it notes, pens, a few guests, and some really witty questions.
For this game, you want to position your family or friends around a table, of course, and have them write the name of a famous celebrity on a post-it note. Then, each person around the table is required to stick their post-it note onto each other’s foreheads.
From there, every person must guess the name of the celebrity written on the post-it note on their forehead by asking other people around the table questions. The person who wins the game is the one that figures out their character by asking the least questions.
Do you think the game is too easy? Try switching it from pop-culture celebrities to historical figures. And if you’re playing it with children, how about using cartoon characters instead?
Secret Lines
Secret Lines is one of the coolest games you can play with your friends at a dinner party. You might actually know this game if you’re familiar with the show ‘Whose Lines Is It Anyways.’
To play this game, you’ll need three components: pens, slips of paper, and the funniest, most nonsensical sentences you can think of. The sentences can be anything from “I like turtles” to “Carl Wheezer is a badass.” You must be confused by now, aren’t you?
Here’s how the game starts: you can either have each person participating in this game write out a sentence on their slip of paper and you collect them all or you yourself can write all of the sentences before the game starts.
Now, since this is a dinner party, you want to place a slip of paper under each guest’s plate before they’re seated, or if they’re seated already, you can simply pass them out. If you’re going for the latter approach, be careful not to let others see what’s written on the paper.
The objective of the game is for the people around the table to carry out a normal conversation whilst attempting to plug their lines into the conversation without getting caught. If you get called out by one of the participants, you’re busted. The winner is the first person that doesn’t get busted.
The game is already pretty challenging, but if you want to take it to the next level, you can make up more than one sentence for each person. This won’t allow for the game to have a winner, but you’ll get to enjoy random hilarious sentences being thrown left and right, keeping you and your guests entertained and laughing for hours.
Goat Lords
Goat Lords is yet another entertaining card game that’s suitable for both adults and children. The goal of this game, as the name hilariously implies, is to become the Lord of the Goats! How do you do that? By striving to amass the biggest herd of goats by the end of the game.
The instructions manual provided in the package helps explain everything about the game very clearly, but just to give you a general idea of how the game goes, there are different types of goats, and each has different point values. Your objective is to stack identical pairs of goats in front of you and fight your competitors for the highest point values.
You can duel your opponents for their goat stack. If you win, the value of your goat herd goes up, which gets you one step closer to the title of Lord of the Goats. However, the higher the value of your goat herd, the more of a target you become to other rivals.
The game also includes action cards that help spice things up by throwing some plot twists here and there. The twists can be in your favor or they can take you back to the drawing board. Action cards include Atomic Goats, Magical Flower Goatees, and Escape Goat. The game is just as hilarious as it sounds.
There’s also an expansive pack that includes characters such as Leonardo Di Goatrio, Goatnald Trump, and of course, Chuck Goatris. Goat Lords is the game for you if you’re looking to hear consistent shrieking and whooping that will have you rolling on the floor.
Detective
Just the name of this game alone instantaneously brings back childhood memories. We’ve all played Detective before, but if you haven’t, pay close attention because this is definitely one of the most entertaining games on the list, as it’s one of those games that are shrouded in mystery.
To play this game, one of the participants must be designated as the detective. Thereafter, the detective must leave the room until further notice. Then, the host has to designate one of the participants as the trapper. The objective of the trapper is to wink at other guests, which, then, requires the person winked at to stand up, carry out a funny motion, and then sit back down.
As you can probably tell by now, the objective of the detective is to figure out who the trapper is. However, the detective has only two attempts. If both guesses are wrong, the trapper wins, and vice versa.
Winning or losing isn’t what’s fun about the game, it’s having to perform those funny dramatic motions in front of everyone after having been winked at by the trapper. And as the trapper, it’s important that your winks be sly and swift so that the detective doesn’t blow your cover.
Icebreaker
Having dinner with guests that you’re not that familiar with might require some icebreaking, and that’s with the Icebreaker deck comes in handy. It’s a perfect tool to use if you’re looking to spark deep and meaningful conversations with the folks around the dinner table. Each card is so engaging that any communication barriers will be broken with ease.
The deck consists of 150 card prompts that are devices into six different categories. Each card unlocks endless conversational possibilities. You might actually spend hours discussing a single card, which leaves you with plenty of other cards to discover on different occasions.
This game will help you and your guests discover a lot of things about each other, from interests and plans to honesty and insight while cultivating openness and quality time. Icebreaker is ideal for in a variety of situations, not just around the dinner table. You can use it with your partner, when you’re catching up with friends, or when you’re in a networking event.
Riddle Me This
Who doesn’t like solving a brain-teasing riddle? Instead of looking up riddles on the internet or trying to remember ones that you’ve been told years ago, how about the Riddle Me This game from After Dinner Amusements? It basically consists of 50 tricky riddles that are packaged in a bright and colorful tin pack.
The tin packaging is pretty compact, allowing you to take it with you anywhere you want, be it to a dinner party or a camping trip. It’s an absolute boredom buster that will help you keep family and friends entertained.
Keep in mind that Riddle Me This is part of a huge game series from After Dinner Amusements. The company offers various other game packs such as Do You Remember, Name That Tune, How Well Do You Know Me, Which Would You Choose, and many, many more.
Telephone
Just like Charade and Detective, Telephone is one of those dinner party classics that just never grow old. The issue with this game is that participants might find it easy to cheat, but if everyone sticks to the rules, you and your guests will have some of the most aching belly laughs.
Telephone is ideal for both adults and children, as it only requires you to be able to speed. All you need to have is a dinner table and any number of participants.
Telephone begins by one person whispering a phrase into the ear of the person to their right and so forth until the phrase reaches the person that’s left of the person hosting the game. Then, that person announces the word they’ve heard to everyone to see if they got it right or not. If someone didn’t hear the phrase, another attempt or “redial” is allowed.
The phrase should preferably be short and concise. Also, participants shouldn’t whisper the phrase too softly that it’s impossible to hear. Further, no one should intentionally change the phrase as they’re playing, as that’s considered cheating.
Final Words
There you have it, some of the most entertaining games you can play around the dinner table or in any situation, really. Now all you need to do is call up your friends and family so that you can enjoy some quality time that’s full of fun and hilarity.
