Dear Hairpin: Party Games?

by The Hairpin

I’m having a party on Saturday and need an idea for a parlor game I can prepare for guests. Not a game that needs to have everyone’s attention at once, but one they can play as they mingle. Something along the lines of Celebrities, but not that. I am hoping for a game that’s a bit quirkier, more creative, and humorous. Any ideas?

Nicole Cliffe: Everyone obviously remembers “Painful Groins in Art.” It was epic.

Well, a gang of Hairpin-friendly art history grad students at Columbia, throwing a bachelorette party, decided to put together their own list of slides of anonymous penises from works of art, and made the bride-to-be identify the painting in question. If she couldn’t name the painting, she drank, and if she could…the rest of them had to.

Unfortunately for them, the bride-to-be had just taken her orals in very recent history, and DOMINATED, so she was practically sober enough to drive at the end of the night, and the other ladies needed to be peeled off the floor.

So, anyway, this is a great idea for a bachelorette (or any other kind of) party game. You can also do famous vulvas, obvi, for lesbian weddings!

Please let us know if you do that.

Jane Marie: I like the one where you give everyone a clothespin or some other sort of pin [Ed.: … ] when they arrive and then choose a forbidden word. Pick a word that’ll definitely get said a lot, like “cocktail” or “Cristal” or “fuck” or something more creative. Tell guests that when they hear someone say the word they can take their pin and pin it on themselves. The person with the most pins at, say, midnight, gets a pretty nice party favor. This is a good one because people scream when they slip up and also rivals will emerge.

Lucia Martinez: I am a big fan of three-second animals, but dunno how well it would work in this sitch. Usually you’re with friends, sitting at a bar table. One person is It. They call out an animal type and count to three (seconds), in which time the other people involved have to draw a version of that animal. The It person picks the best representation, and then that person is It. The more drunk you get, the more hilarious it gets.

Also, maybe one could parlor game Dorothy Parker’s (I think) version of place settings, which involved putting a book that she thought embodied a dinner guest at that guest’s place, and then everyone had to figure out which place was theirs. Which makes me want to throw a dinner party.

Lindsay Miller: This is making me feel so sad that I don’t know any good party games! My friends usually just get drunk and play Catchphrase, which is awesome (“Seven deadly…” “Dwarves!”). Oh, and one time I went into the kitchen for another drink and came out to find everybody thoroughly engrossed in a game of strip Scattergories.

You could play the game where everybody picks a category, like “animals” or “movie stars” or “dairy-free cream liqueurs,” and then you take turns drawing a card from a deck and put it in front of you, face up. If the card you draw matches the suit of someone else’s card, you have to say something in their category before they say something in yours. In general, this leads to a lot of yelling and cursing.

Lili Loofbourow: The Painful Groins game! There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. YAY.

A) I’ve never played this, but love Lindsay’s idea of Scattergories with made-up categories that could be filled out throughout the night (instead of the usual 60-second time limit)? Everybody would have their own card with quirky categories to fill out? Before Scattergories existed, that’s how we used to play that game (in Chile it was called Bachillerato, as in Bachelor’s Degree, for some reason. Must ask next time I’m home). Possible categories: Famous Vampires; Nice Guys (TM) From ’80s Movies; Female Cartoon Characters; Disney Mammals; Young Adult Novel Heroes/Heroines; Internet Memes.

At the party, the guest of honor could choose the letter? Or their initial would be the letter?

B) A set of party Slam books?

Can we have a party where we play all the games everyone is suggesting?

Katie Walsh: Well, my game claim to fame I included in the Game Night post so it might be a retread, but I invented a great naughty game called Sexual Fetish Game where everyone writes one real sexual fetish and one fake one and puts them in a bowl, then people draw from the bowl and the group tries to guess who it belongs to and if it’s real. Play while drinking heavily/with people you feel comfortable with!

We also invented a game at the beer garden in Queens one time that involved holding up a playing card to your head, and everyone tried to point at the person they thought had the lowest card. Seemed to make sense at the time.

More suggestions?

Photo by Mike Flippo, via Shutterstock