Halloween Party Games

What costumes and low light actually do to a game

Halloween is the only party of the year where the guests are in costume and the lights are deliberately down, and both of those break games in ways that no list of Halloween games ever mentions. It is worth being specific about how, because once you know the two constraints the choice of what to play more or less makes itself.

Costumes take away three things. Faces, first — masks and paint mean you cannot read a reaction, which quietly disables anything built on watching somebody's expression. Then hands: gloves, claws, false nails and sleeves that hang past the fingers make anything fiddly a genuine irritation. And then the willingness to sit still, because people who spent two hours and forty pounds on an outfit did not come to look at a phone on a coffee table. A game that puts everyone's eyes on one small screen wastes the one night of the year they all dressed up.

Low light takes away less than people expect. A phone is backlit, so reading from it is fine — better than in daylight, if anything. What stops working is everything that needs the room to see something that is not lit: a subtle expression, a gesture at the far end of a hallway, anything written on paper. Notice that the two constraints point the same way, which is why the list above starts where it does.

What the game lists get wrong about this night

Search for Halloween games and you get two things, neither of which is what most people are actually looking for. The larger half is children's activities that need a shopping trip — doughnuts on strings, pumpkin bowling, wrapping someone in toilet paper — all of which are good fun for a seven-year-old at four in the afternoon and none of which survive a room of adults. The smaller half is drinking games.

The gap between them is the common case: it is ten o'clock, there are twenty people in your flat in costume, the conversation has settled into three groups, and you would like something for the room to do that involves neither craft supplies nor another round. Nothing in that gap requires a theme, a prop or a purchase — it requires games that work with masks on, in the dark, over music.

That is also the honest answer to whether you need spooky questions. A themed bank is a pleasant extra and it is not what makes the evening feel like Halloween; the costumes and the room are already doing that work, and no question about vampires improves on them. Choose for the conditions rather than the subject matter and the night looks after its own atmosphere.

The two Halloween parties, and why one list cannot serve both

One search term covers two events with almost nothing in common. There is a party at two in the afternoon for children who are vibrating with sugar and cannot wait to go out, and there is a party at ten at night for adults. Every list that tries to serve both ends up serving neither, which is why the recommendations above are mostly for the second and say clearly which one is not.

For the children's version, three things matter more than the choice of game. Keep each activity under about fifteen minutes, because a child already in costume has a very short runway. Use the family question banks deliberately rather than whatever is switched on. And accept that the costume is a distraction machine — anything requiring sustained concentration is competing with a cape, and it will lose.

Running a costume contest that is not a popularity contest

Judging by applause is the default and it is the worst available method, because it measures how many friends somebody has in the room rather than what they are wearing. The person who wins on volume usually knew they would win before they arrived, and everybody else worked out the result during the first round of clapping.

Named categories fix most of it in one move. Funniest, most effort, best homemade, best group, and the one worth stealing — worst execution of the best idea, which rewards ambition over budget and is reliably the award people most want to win. Several people take something home, the categories reward different things, and nobody is ranked against a costume they were never competing with.

Two smaller rules make it work. Pick the judges at random rather than asking for volunteers, because whoever volunteers is by definition not competing, and that correlates almost perfectly with whoever did not bother with a costume. And announce the categories before the party rather than on the night — someone who knows in advance that best homemade is an award will actually make something, which is the entire point of having one.

What to avoid is the catwalk: calling people to the front one at a time. It has the same arithmetic problem as any turn-based game in a big room, twenty-nine people watching one, and it adds a second failure of its own — the shyest guest in the best costume will simply not come forward, and the award goes to whoever was happiest performing.

Playing around the doorbell

If you are at home on the thirty-first, the door goes every few minutes from about half past five until the trick-or-treaters thin out around half eight. That is three hours in which nothing requiring sustained attention can survive, and it catches people out every year because it is the part of the evening nobody plans for.

So split the night in two. Until the door stops, play only things that can be interrupted without cost — independent questions, nothing scored, nothing with a turn order to lose track of. Once it goes quiet, that is the moment to start the game with rules in it. If you would rather play properly the whole way through, put the bowl outside on a chair with a sign; it works, and the alternative is spending your own party in the hallway.

Worth noting that when the thirty-first falls midweek, most parties move to the nearest Saturday and the door problem disappears entirely — which makes the weekend party the one to plan the longer games for, and the night itself the one to keep loose.

When the party is bigger than the room

Halloween parties overfill their rooms more often than any other kind, for two reasons that compound. Invitations are looser — plus-ones and friends-of-friends are the norm rather than the exception — and costumes take up physical space that a headcount does not predict. Wings, hoops, oversized heads and anything with a tail mean thirty guests occupy the floor area of forty.

The practical consequence is that you should assume you cannot gather everyone, and pick games that do not need you to. Anything where the whole room answers at once is unaffected by crowding, where anything turn-based degrades fast. The general version of this problem, including which games have a hard player cap, is worked through on the large-groups page.

What to skip

• Anything needing fine motor control. Gloves, claws and false nails are on a third of the room, and none of them were chosen for dexterity.
• Anything that depends on seeing faces clearly. Half the point of the night is that you cannot, and a game fighting the costumes will lose to them.
• Anything requiring props you have to buy or make. If you are reading this on the day, the shops have been stripped of anything orange since the weekend.
• Anything that makes people remove part of a costume in order to play. They spent the evening assembling it and they are not taking the head off for a game.
• Anything needing the room silent and facing one person. A Halloween party is louder and more scattered than any other, and that is the party working rather than failing.