Thanksgiving Games for Family: 16 Ideas for Every Age
Thanksgiving has a long stretch of waiting built into it. The turkey needs another forty minutes, half the family has arrived, and the kids have already found the pie. A good game fills that gap and gets cousins who see each other once a year talking.
This list is sorted by when you need it: games for while the food cooks, games for the table, games for after dinner when nobody can move, and a few phone games for the kids' table. Almost none of them need anything you have to buy.
While the turkey cooks
These work with a mix of ages and with people coming and going.
1. Turkey hunt. Cut twenty small turkeys out of brown paper (or trace a hand, kids are happy to make these) and hide them around the house and yard. Write a number on the back of each one. Whoever finds the highest total wins, which means the little ones can beat the teenagers with one lucky find.
2. Thankful jar. Put a jar and a stack of paper strips by the door. Everyone who arrives writes one thing they are thankful for, without a name. At dinner, pass the jar around, read them out and guess who wrote each one. Grandparents are always easier to guess than they think.
3. Leaf pile relay. If you have a yard and some leaves, split into two teams with a rake and a tarp each. The first team to move its pile to the finish line wins. Ten minutes of this and the kids will sit still for grace.
4. Pie charades. Write Thanksgiving words on slips of paper: pilgrim, pumpkin, parade, wishbone, stuffing, football, nap. Act them out without talking. It is ordinary charades, but the theme gives younger kids words they can actually act.
At the table
Games for when everyone is seated and you want one conversation instead of six.
5. Two truths and a turkey. Each person says three things about their year: two true, one made up. Everyone guesses the fake. It is a sneaky way to catch up on news without a round of "so what have you been up to".
6. Gratitude ABC. Go around the table. The first person names something they are thankful for that starts with A, the next takes B, and so on. Q, X and Z get creative fast.
7. Guess the guest. Before dinner, ask every guest one question: favorite side dish, first concert, worst job. Read the answers out one at a time and let the table guess who said what.
8. Napkin drawing telephone. One person writes a phrase on a napkin. The next person draws it, the next writes what they think the drawing shows, and so on around the table. The last napkin is read out next to the first one. This one gets loud.
After dinner
The part of the day when everyone is full, the game is on in the other room and nobody wants to stand up.
9. Card games. One deck of cards covers the whole family. Crazy eights is easy enough for a six-year-old and still fun for adults, and our crazy eights rules cover the scoring and house rules if your family argues about those. Spoons is the loudest card game ever invented and needs only a deck and a pile of spoons (one fewer than players).
10. Pie-eating contest, slow version. Each player gets one small slice. The rule is that you must eat it without hands. Kids love it, and it photographs well.
11. Football predictions. If the games are on, give everyone a sheet before kickoff to guess the final score, the first team to score and the number of field goals. The closest guess gets the last slice of pie or skips dish duty.
12. Thanksgiving trivia. Put together ten questions about the food, the parade and your own family history. "What year did Uncle Dan burn the rolls" is a better question than anything you will find online.
13. Left, right, turkey. Sit in a circle with one wrapped small prize. Someone reads a short story with lots of "left" and "right" in it, and the prize moves in that direction each time. Whoever holds it at the end keeps it. Any story works if you swap the words in.
Thanksgiving games for kids on one phone
Sometimes the kids' table needs something quieter. These games run in a browser, need no download and work on whatever phone is lying around.
14. Order Up, Kitty! A cat chef opens a burger joint. You take the order, grill the patties and stack each burger to match the ticket. Kids who have been shooed out of the kitchen all morning finally get to cook something.
15. Needle Panic. One needle in five million pieces of hay. You dig by hand at first, then with pitchforks, magnets and finally a combine harvester. It fits the harvest mood, and two kids can take turns to see who finds it faster.
16. Board night on one phone. Cats vs Dogs: Board Night has four in a row, checkers and tic-tac-toe with cat and dog pieces, and two players can share one phone. Good for a cousin who would rather not talk yet.
How to pick the right game
Count your guests first. Charades, napkin telephone and two truths work best with eight or more people. Card games and phone games are better for groups of two to five.
Then look at ages. If the youngest guest is four and the oldest is eighty, pick games where nobody has to read fast or run: the thankful jar, gratitude ABC and the turkey hunt all fit.
Finally, think about timing. Plan one game for the waiting part of the day and one for after dinner. More than that and it starts to feel like a school event.
More free games for the long weekend are on our Thanksgiving games page.
