White Elephant
What follows are the best white elephant rules. All other rules pale in comparison.
- Everyone should bring a present.
- Everyone should buy said present. Decide on a target amount before hand. Crappy gifts are sometimes funny, but ruin the one thing that is fun about presents. Hope. If you don't buy a gift then it should still be a fun or useful present.
- Give everyone a number, or letter, or use some other way of determining an order. Then everyone is going to have a turn in that order.
- On your turn, you have two choices, A) take a present from the pile and open it (if there are none, then you don't get this choice), B) "steal" a present from someone else (if no one else has a present you don't get this choice).
- If you take a present from someone else, the turn is passed to them. They then have the same two options with one exception: They cannot take a present that has already been stolen that turn.
- The first person to go gets another turn at the very end.
Most people play some sort of rule where after a present has been stolen a certain number of times it is no longer steal-able. This is to prevent the game from going indefinitely. However, this means the good presents quickly go out of commission and all that is left are presents that no one wants. Which is no fun. That's what my rule 5 is about. It prevents it from going on forever in a specific turn, which solves the problem for the whole game. With that rule, and 10 people, the most possible steals in a game would be 45. Which isn't too bad.
I think the best thing to do to keep the game short would be to implement a time limit. Something like, a person has 45 seconds to decide and if after that they haven't decided someone chooses a gift from the pile for them. That would keep things moving pretty quickly.
All that being said, I think white elephant is tons of fun!
22 December 2010 12:43am UTC • 152 views • 1 comment
Tagged with whitelephant, presents, rules
Add a comment!
You must be a member to do that! Become a member or login!
Subscribe to the feeds:
1 comment
Sailing Master Keri
22 December 2010 12:46am UTC
I love white elephant games! I've never played with unlimited steals, and I would be interested to see how it goes!