Party games

[ladyofastolat]

I'm on the lookout for children's party games played at traditional children's parties. We've got a list already, but would like an even longer list, so they can be whittled down to the best ones. So far we've got:

Musical chairs
Musical bumps (I was unvanquished champion of musical bumps as a child, but the ground was a lot closer then. I suspect that playing it now would result in bruises and broken things.)
Musical statues, ideally in its Musical Monsters form
Pass the parcel
Sleeping/Dead lions (naming dispute ongoing)
Pin the something on the whatever
Grandmother's footsteps
Oranges and Lemons (although even as a child, I never quite worked out what the point of the game was, and it always took so long, and once the chopper who came to chop off my head thumped my nose, and I cried.)
What's the time, Mr Wolf?
Poor Pussy

Quite a few more games come to mind, but I think they're more playground games than party games - e.g. The Farmer's in his Den, Red Letter, I sent a letter to my love, etc. We always clamoured to play Murder in the Dark when I was little, but never knew what we were supposed to do, so just milled around in the dark for a bit until someone screamed, whereupon we all went "er...", dithered a bit on confusion, and moved on to the next game.

By the way, the age of the special little birthday boy is 40, so don't worry about games being too complicated or likely to end in tears. But we don't want any of that teenage hanky-panky stuff, or games that involve singling people out to do embarassing things.

Comments

[helflaed.livejournal.com]

One real biggie up here is "Corners"

It is sort of a variant of muscial statues, except that everyone runs to their choice of corner when the music stops. In each corner is a picture, and then everyone in (for example) the Tardis corner is out. Repeat until only one person is left.

Just don't make the mistake I did and hand out tpy waterpistols as prizes or they will NEVER stop playing with them!

Balloon race. Two teams, people standing one beind the other. The person at the front passes the balloon over his head to no2, who passes it between his legs to no 3, who passes it over his head etc until the person at the end of the line gets it and runs to the front. The team which ends up with no1 at the front again is the winner.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Ooh, Corners sounds ideal - very easy to organise, and likely to work just as well with 20 as with 40. (Numbers are currently fairly vague.) The balloon race sounds good, too. Hopefully organising adults into equally sized teams should be a whole lot easier than organising 5 year olds in the library. I sometimes end up with a team of 3 facing a team of 11, since no-one in the team of 11 wants to be separated from sisters, friends, cousins etc.