Thanksgiving Games for the Whole Family

The best Thanksgiving games for family are the ones that fit around the meal instead of competing with it. Thanksgiving is not a party with a games slot; it is a long day with three natural gaps: the morning before the kitchen gets busy, the stretch while the turkey rests, and the slow hour between dinner and pie. This page has ten games that fill those gaps, a running order that puts each one where it works, and four lists you can read straight off your phone: 45 Thanksgiving charades ideas from easy to hard, 20 Thanksgiving Would You Rather questions, a ten-question trivia round with answers, and a twelve-category Scattergories list.

Every game works with a mixed-age table, from a six-year-old to a great-grandparent, and none needs anything you would not already have in the house on Thanksgiving Day. The one exception is the football, and a rolled-up pair of socks has stood in for one at plenty of family games.

The ten games at a glance

1. Thanksgiving charades

Charades is the game that gets a full room off its chairs, which is exactly what the hour after dinner needs. Split the room into two teams across generations, so grandparents and grandkids act for each other, give each actor 60 seconds, and use the three lists further down. Easy prompts score one point, medium two and hard three, so the confident actors take the risky ones. If your family wants more once the Thanksgiving prompts run out, the charades for kids list keeps the youngest players in the game and the movies for charades list works for every age at the table.

2. Thanksgiving Would You Rather

Read a question aloud, everyone answers at once, and the people in the minority have to defend their pick. It is the easiest game to run at the table because nobody has to stand up or put down a fork. The 20 questions below are about the day itself: the kids' table, leftovers, the wishbone, the drive home. Once the table is warmed up, the Would You Rather questions for kids keep the younger cousins involved, and the funny Would You Rather questions suit the adults.

3. Thankful ABC

This replaces the stiff round of "what are you thankful for" that half the table dreads. Go around in order and work through the alphabet: A for aunts, B for the bakery that made the pie, C for the cousin who drove five hours. Anyone who stalls for five seconds gets help from the table. It takes about ten minutes for 26 letters, it gets a laugh at Q, X and Z, and it still ends up saying the thing the tradition is for.

4. Thanksgiving trivia round

The turkey needs 20 to 40 minutes to rest before carving, and that is the gap most hosts forget to plan. One person reads the ten questions below, players or teams write their answers on a napkin, and the winners get first pick of the pie. The questions mix history (the 1621 feast, Lincoln's proclamation, the 1941 law that fixed the date) with parade, football and turkey facts, so nobody has to be a history teacher to score.

5. Thanksgiving Scattergories

Hand out paper, pick a letter, and give everyone three minutes to fill the twelve Thanksgiving categories below. Answers that match another player's score nothing. It is the best game for adults who arrive while the cook still needs the kitchen to themselves, because it keeps people seated and out of the way. The full rules and eleven more category lists are on the Scattergories lists page.

6. Leftovers Pictionary

After pie, nobody wants to act, but most people will still draw. Play Pictionary with Thanksgiving prompts (the charades lists below work for drawing too) on a pad of paper or a child's whiteboard, with 60 seconds per drawing. The Pictionary words page has 180 more prompts and a random word picker that runs on a phone, so the drawer never sees the list.

7. Turkey Bowl touch football

The backyard or park football game before dinner is an American tradition for a reason: it gets the restless relatives out of the house while the oven does its work. Keep it to two-hand touch, play to a time limit rather than a score, and make the teams mix ages. Forty-five minutes is enough; finish an hour before dinner so everyone can clean up.

8. Family Two Truths and a Lie

Each person says three things about themselves, two true and one invented, and the table votes on the lie. At Thanksgiving it works best when the statements are about family history nobody else knows: the job grandpa had at seventeen, the year an aunt lived abroad. It turns relatives who see each other once a year into people with stories.

9. Pass the pumpkin

Hot potato for the youngest guests: the kids sit in a circle and pass a small pumpkin or gourd while music plays, and whoever holds it when the music stops does a silly task or is out. It runs itself while the adults finish cooking, and it uses a decoration you probably already have on the table.

10. Family Fishbowl

For the evening, play Fishbowl with one family twist: every player writes a relative's name, a family memory and a Thanksgiving food on three slips. The game runs in three rounds with the same slips (describe it, one word, act it out), so by the last round someone is miming the year the turkey caught fire. Allow 45 minutes for ten players.