Party game guides
Everything we have learned from building and playing party games: rules that settle arguments, which games survive a crowd, and word lists you can use on paper or on a phone.
Start here
The word lists page publishes every category in the game — 1,600+ words across 30 decks — so you can read them, print them or play them straight from a phone. The Who Am I page covers the forehead-name game specifically: both versions of the rules, 434 names to use, and the regional names people know it by.
By occasion
Party games for large groups
Big groups break most party games: with twenty people, a turn-based game leaves nineteen of them waiting. This covers the games that scale, why teams are the fix, and how to run an evening that keeps its momentum.
Family game night games
The hard part of family game night is not finding a game, it is finding one where a seven-year-old and a grandparent are on equal footing. These remove reading, keep turns short and let you set the difficulty per player.
Road trip games
Car games have constraints nothing else does: the driver has to watch the road and half the players cannot see each other. Ten games that work inside those limits, including which ones survive a dead zone with no signal.
Classroom games
Games that need no preparation, no student accounts and no app-store approval. Most double as vocabulary or speaking practice, which is the difference between a game that is a break and a game that is a lesson.
Rules
How to play charades
The complete rules: setup, turn length, the hand signals that stop arguments, three ways to score, and the variations — fishbowl, reverse charades, forehead charades — worth trying once the standard game gets easy.
Choosing a game
Party games for two people
Most party games assume a party. These are the ones that survive at two players, plus the three adjustments that make the rest of them work.
Games like Heads Up
Eight alternatives compared — charades, Taboo, fishbowl, Codenames and others — with an honest note on which suits which group and what each one needs in the way of equipment.
The short version, if you are in a hurry
Two players are enough for a guessing game, but four to eight is where it comes alive. Keep rounds to sixty seconds; short rounds keep the energy up and make people braver. If the group is mixed in age or nationality, pick a deck that needs no shared background — animals, food and actions travel much further than celebrities. And once a group goes past eight people, stop taking individual turns and split into teams.
Everything above works with paper and a pen. If you would rather not write anything down, upheads deals the words, runs the timer and keeps score on a single phone.