What it is: A very flexible game with lots of adaptations.
Best for: A group of about 4 to 10.
What you need: You’ll need a list of categories (I’ve provided one below) and possibly a timer and pens and paper.
How to play: Basically the challenge is to try and think of as many items in a category as you can. An example category would be fast food.
And items in the category? Chicken nuggets, tacos, hamburgers, hot dogs, French fries, McDonald’s apple pies, chicken sandwiches, and on and on. How many things can you think of?
Variations: There are many different ways you could set up your game. Here’s a few to get you started.
Like the game Scattergories (commission link), you can name as many items in a category that start with the same letter. Choose a letter from the alphabet, draw a category, set a timer, and go! For example, if the category were male names and the letter were C, you could write any of these:
- Carson
- Caleb
- Cole
- Christian
- Connor
- Carter
- Cameron
You can play on teams, individually, or as a whole group. At the end of the game, everyone takes turns reading all their answers aloud, where questionable answers can be submitted to the group to see if they’ll be allowed or not. (For example: “Camille? That’s a girl’s name!” “But I totally knew a guy named Camille once!” “OK, fine, we’ll allow it.”) If you’re playing against each other, the person who writes down the most names wins. (One variation is to have everyone cross off any name that someone else wrote down, too. That way the person with the most unique answers wins.)
You could also play the above version, but without the restriction of a letter of the alphabet. Any boy name, for example, would work for the above example. Then follow the same rules for the rest of the game.
Another variation which works really well for car rides or killing time can be played one word at a time. In this variation, you pick a category and then take turns saying something from that category, one player at a time. The first person who can’t think of a word that hasn’t already been said is out of the game, and you start a new round with a new category. (The game first letter, last letter is an even more challenging variation of this.)
You could of course use your list of categories to play the pool game categories or a similar game.
What other rules or variations can you come up with?
Printables: Here’s the list of categories! It’s a few pages long, so hopefully it gives you lots of categories to choose from for all of your game-playing needs. 🙂
Categories