Adult birthday party games that help break the ice and set the mood for a great event.
Adult birthday party games don't need to be serious and competitive. Some of our adult birthday game ideas are perfect for just having fun with your friends and family!
Autographs
Age: adults
Players: 5 or more
What you need: Pencil for each player
Preparation: Copies of your guest list for each player.
This is another great ice breaker game, especially for adult birthday parties.
Give each player a copy of the guest list. The idea of this game is to go around to each guest and collect their autograph next to where their name is printed on the guestlist.
The first player to get the complete list of names with correct signatures wins.
Fold or Scrunch
Age: adult
Players: 8+
What you need: nothing
This is another funny way to separate your guests into separate teams for any reason. All you do is ask your guests whether they “Fold or Scrunch” their toilet paper before using it!
It’s pretty gross and only do it if you feel like your guests are going to be good sports, but you’ll be amazed to see that almost every single time, it divides equally in half!
Telephone
Age range: any
Players: 8+ (the more, the better)
What you need:
- Several sheets of paper
- Several pencils
Split the group into two equal sized teams. Each team selects a captain. The captains both get together and write a special message. The message can be anything. Popular ideas are song lyrics, sayings such as “the early bird catches the word,” or even parts of a poem.
The captains then whispers this message to the first person on her team. This person then whispers it to the person next to her and so on down the line goes the message.
The last person parrots back she heard. Almost always it’s totally different than the original message, which is a good reason why you should always be suspicious of what you hear as a rumor!
Game name: Guess the Object
Age: any
Items needed:
- A box or basket that can be covered
- Some random object that will fit into the box, such as:
- A potato
- Biscuit
- Onion
- Carrot
- Jewelry
- CD
- Telephone
- Tissues
- Paper
- String
To prepare, place all of the objects into the box.
Rules:
Each participant puts their hand into the box and feels each of the objects without looking at any of them. After the guest has spent about one minute feeling the objects, provide the participant with a piece of paper and a pencil and ask the person to write down the objects. The person who gets the most correct answer wins the game!
Game name: Bean Counters
Age: any
Items needed:
- 12 beans for each player playing
- Small bags for each set of 12 beans
To prepare, place 12 beans into each of the bags. Prepare enough bags for each of the guests who want to play.
Rules:
Each player grabs a handful of the beans and closes her hand around them. When ready, she goes to one of the other players and asks, “Odds or evens?” The opposing player responds. If the response is correct, the guesser gets the beans that were in the first player’s hand. If the response is wrong, the guesser needs to give the same number of beans (by reaching into her bag) to the first player.
The object of this game is to obtain all the beans!
Blown-Up Fortunes
Age: any
Players: at least 4
What you need:
- A balloon for each player, and quite a few extras to substitute for the ones that break ahead of time
- A fortune, written on a slip of paper, for each player
Push one of the fortunes into each balloon. This is a fun idea for adult parties as well, since you can craft each fortune to be appropriate for the age of your guests.
After a fortune has been stuffed into the balloon, blow them up and tie them off. Your guests will have a great time popping their balloons (all together or one-by-one) and reading the fortunes inside.
One great idea we’ve heard about is to make the fortune into some kind of surprise for the winner.
Yip Yap
Age: any
Players: 10+ (the more the better)
What you need: None
This is a great ice breaker game for parties where the guests don’t know one another very well or are meeting for the first time.
One player is “IT” and stands in the middle of a circle formed by the other players. The other players in the circle call out their names one by one. Everyone then tries to remember the full name of the person to the right and to the left.
IT then points to a person and says, “YIP – one – two – three – four – five” The person who was pointed to has five seconds to say the full name of the person to his right. If IT said, “YAP” instead, then the pointed person has five seconds to say the name of the person to his left.
This is a fun way for people to learn the names of all the party participants. Especially, effective as an ice breaker type birthday party game.
Bean and a Handshake
Age: any
Players: 12-36
What you need:
- 10 or 12 dried beans or small marbles for each player
- A small plastic bag or envelope for each player
To get ready, put the beans or marbles in sets of 10 into the small plastic bags.
This is also a great ice breaker game. Each player gets one of the small bags that you prepared before the party. The instruction is to go around the room and shake hands with the other guests as fast as you can. For every tenth person with whom you shake hands, you give away one of your beans. The objective of the game is to get rid of all your beans.
You will soon see that you create a frenzy of activity with this game. Guests will be running frantically toward one another as they do their best to get rid of their beans.
The game can also be played in the opposite direction where you try to acquire as many beans as possible and the person with the highest number of beans is the winner.
We recommend that you try it both ways to see how things turn out!
Murder and Detective
Age: teens and adults
Players: 6+
What you need:
- A slip of paper for each player—one with an X on it and one with an 0—the rest blank
- A receptacle to hold all the small slips of paper
Preparation: Fold over the slips so that the markings on them cannot be seen and put them in a bowl.
Each player selects a slip of paper from the receptacle. They need to unfold it and not let anyone else see what’s on their slip of paper. The player who has an X on her slip of paper is the Murderer, and the player who has a 0 is the Detective. The detective lets the others know that he’s the Detective and he must now leave the room.
Now, it’s time for the fun to begin! While the Detective is gone, the Murderer touches one of the other players on the neck and that player is now dead! It’s often even more entertaining to turn the lights off so no one can see who the Murderer is. But if it’s not possible to turn off the lights, don’t worry. Just tell everyone in the room that it’s a secret.
Now the Detective comes back into the room. Her job is to identify the murderer with three guesses. She can ask as many questions as she’d like, and the other players do NOT have to tell the truth.
Sound hard? I might be, but it’s actually quite interesting to see how hard it is to keep a secret! Most of the time, the Detective can solve the crime just by looking at the faces in the room!
Talk-a-thon
Age: teens and adults
Players: 4-30
What you need: You’ll need a watch where you can see the seconds, a stop watch, or a timer
Divide the group in half and line them up in two rows. Those in one row stand back to back with those in the other row. The players standing back to back become partners.
When the referee says, “GO!”, each pair of partners turn around, face one another and start talking to one another non-stop. They must try to talk to each other without stopping for 30 seconds. Both partners talk the entire time (not one at a time).
One alternate idea is to single out one pair of participants to play the game for 30 seconds while the others watch. You’ll be surprised at the crazy things people come up with when they’re forced to talk without a break for so long!
Ways to match teams:
Balloon Buddies
Age: teen and adult
Players: 8+
What you need:
- 1 balloon for each player
- Names of players on small slips
To get ready, put the small slips of paper into each balloon. Blow up each balloon and tie them off.
Hand each participant a balloon. When everyone has a balloon, tell them to POP! The name on the slip of paper is who their next partner is. You can use different colored balloons to keep track of things like age or boy/girl, if you want some control over who gets what.
Players get two partners—the one they pick and the one who picks them—enough for two games.
