So, you have to roll out a holiday party for 15 board members and their guests. You’ve secured the venue, the menu is chosen, the room is decorated for the season, and you’ve hired a popular jazz quartet. Here is your challenge:  Your client wants her guests to have fun, to play a game that encourages them to interact with each other, and she has an idea! She wants you to create a game and call it the “Amazing Holiday Race.” What do you do?

We divided guests into 6 teams of 5. We set up the room with 6 stations with easy, inexpensive tasks for the team to complete. Client staff supervised each station. We wrote rules for each contest and made sure the players understood them.

Everyone played the games, all of them laughed—hard, and all of them were filled with holiday spirit – even the losing teams.

Here are the games we chose to play.

  1. Client knowledge – come up with 15 questions about your organization. Each group gets one answer sheet. Don’t make the questions too easy.
  2. Penny stacking – each member of the group must stack 25 pennies using only one hand.
  3. Mascot Game – you’ve probably played this before yourself. Download the 36 well-known company mascot quizzes from the web. Each group gets one answer sheet and they are not allowed to use their cell phones to look up answers.
  4. Red Cup, Blue Cup: put at least 20 red cups in a stack with a blue cup at the bottom. Each team member, using alternate hands, restacks the cups until the blue one is back on the bottom.
  5. Map of the World:  put a 50-piece puzzle together. We used a map of the world.
  6. Decorate your Ornament: each team member decorates a plain wooden ornament with paint pens.

The game materials cost $200! The winning team each received a $25 gift card. You can spend more if you like, but the fun is in the doing not necessarily in the winning.

Do you have an idea for an unusual Holiday Party? Let Your Great Event help you put it together.