Families

A team-building, relaxed, icebreaker, memory game


How To Play Families

Materials Needed

Pieces of paper, pen

This is a game that requires little preparation and is fun among small groups.

Have the players sit in a large circle so they can easily separate their "families" (more on that soon). Next, get players to write down a favourite of theirs, i.e. Favourite band, food, sport. When they are done, mix the pieces up and read each of them out loud only twice. Then, choose someone to be a "picker." The picker will choose a person and ask them if their favourite ______ was ______. If they get the answer right, the person they guessed will join the picker's family and the picker can keep guessing. If not, the picker will join the family of the person they guessed and the person who was wrongly guessed will become the picker. If the leader of a family guesses something wrong, the picker's entire family will join the wrongly guessed person's family. This process will continue until one big family is made from everyone. The leader of that family wins!

Remember, players cannot ask to hear the favorites again and they may not take notes on their own paper. They must use their memory and their memory only. They may, however, discuss it with their "family members."

Themes

You get to know people by seperating fact from fiction.

Added by
Freak the Geek
on 27 April 2015


5 Comments

Add a comment

Join the Discussion

All comments are reviewed and moderated before being displayed on the website. Please allow 24-48 hours for your comments to be activated. By submitting this form you agree to our privacy policy and disclaimer.

This is just Empires with a different name.

Posted by Elijah 5 years ago

This is a favorite of our group. But we play that if you guess incorrectly you don't go join the person you guessed's family, you just stay where you are. You only move to join a family if you've been guessed. So the leader of each family is basically the one who hasn't been guessed yet.

Posted by Heather 6 years ago

This game is so fun! We have played this many times with very large groups of people of all ages. The leader is basically whomever's turn it is. One person starts by reading out all the slips of paper from the entire group. Don't write down your own name, and then that person can still play. It is best if you pick a category with many options so everyone writes something different. We have the first leader read the papers to themselves first, and if there are duplicates, call them out and have those people choose something else. Once we have no duplicates, we then read them out loud to the group.

We separate families by rearranging our seating as the game plays out. If the leader guesses someone correctly, that person has to go sit by the leader and is part of their family and out of play. The leader continues to guess (with help from their family members if needed) and gain family members until they make an incorrect guess. If the leader guesses the head of another family, they then gain that entire family. Keep families sitting together, and in the end, you have two families, each trying to remember what options were left to guess. The winner is whomever no one guess, and therefore, has all the players as their family in the end.

Posted by Emily 6 years ago

How do you seperate them into families and what do they mean by a leader, is that someone chosen ahead of time to be the leader in the family?

Posted by Emily 7 years ago

I tried to play this last night with a group of about 30 and it did not go so well. We did favorite ice cream flavor, but there were too many different answers. Perhaps it would work if you did something that would be limited, like favorite Snow White dwarf or Santa's reindeer. Also, you wouldn't have to pass around papers for those.

One of the girls playing did tell me afterward that she had played it in her small group and it worked out well. They had a group of about 12 and they did famous actors/actresses.

Posted by Veronica Palmer 7 years ago
Pin it
Comment Post comment
Upvoted
Upvote
Similar Similar games