Charades

How To Play Charades

Charades is a classic family game of acting and guesses. It's been around for a fair while but we'll give you a run down of the rules just in case. The premise is this - one person will act out something up the front while the others guess what they're acting. It can be played just for fun or as a competition where teams play-off against each other. We'll explain the rules for acting first, and then two competition versions below.

HOW TO ACT
The actor will need to follow a few rules:
- They must not speak and they can only use actions.
- They can't spell out words using air writing.
- They can use commonly known category actions to help the guessers. These can include movies (film reel), music (singing action), books (open a book) and more.
- They can also use a word designator. By holding up a number of fingers, they can signal that the phrase that's being acted has a certain number of words. Then they can point to a finger to signal which word of the phrase they are acting out.

CHALLENGE ROUNDS
The leader will need to come up with a list of words, or you can use a Charades set like this one. For each round, every team playing must send one player up to find out the word. This can be done by the leader showing them the word on a list, or by one of the players picking up a word card and sharing it around with the other actors. Once all the actors are ready, they can return to their teams' area and start acting it out. The first team to guess correctly, wins the round. Keep playing rounds until a team reaches the goal or the time runs out.

SPEED CHARADES
The leader will need to come up with a list of words and keep them secret. Each team sends one player up to look at the first word from the leader's list. When the leader says go, the players run back to their teams and start acting. Once their team guesses correctly, then need to send a new player up to tell the leader the word they guessed. The leader will then reveal the next word to the new player and they must return to their team to keep acting. This continues until one team guesses all the words on the list correctly - they are the winners!

This version can become even more fun when you add a running component to it. After a word is guessed, the next player sent up to the leader must first run around the house/building!

Added by
Joel
on 22 May 2020