Classic party games to play with family
Ludiko editors · 21 October 2026
Not every game night needs a screen. Here are classic games, passed down through generations, that you can play with paper and pencil or nothing at all, and that players of every age can join.
Charades
Players split into two teams. On their turn, a player acts out the title of a film, series or book chosen by the other team, without a single word. First they show the number of words with their fingers, then act out the words one by one. The team scores if it guesses the title before time runs out. For young children, use animals or jobs instead of titles.
Categories (Name, Place, Animal)
Everyone has paper and a pencil and draws columns such as name, city, animal, plant and object. One player silently runs through the alphabet, another says “stop”, and everyone writes words starting with that letter. When the first player finishes and calls “done”, everyone stops writing. A word nobody else wrote scores 10, a shared word 5. Leave out letters that almost no words start with, such as X.
Twenty Questions
One player thinks of an object, a person or a place. The others ask up to twenty questions that can only be answered “yes” or “no”. Starting broad, with questions like “Is it alive?” or “Would you find it at home?”, narrows things down fast. If nobody gets it in twenty questions, the player who chose it wins.
Word Chain
The first player says a word; the next player must say a new word that starts with the last letter of that word. A word cannot be repeated. A player who cannot find a word within five seconds is out. Narrowing the topic, for example only animals or only cities, makes it harder.
Telephone
Players sit side by side. The first player whispers a sentence into the next player’s ear, and it is passed along to the end. The last player says out loud what they heard. Seeing how much the sentence changed is the best moment of the game; there is no winner, and the laugh belongs to everyone.
Who Am I?
A paper with the name of a famous person or a fairy-tale character is stuck to each player’s forehead, where they cannot see it. Taking turns, players ask yes-or-no questions to work out who they are. The first to guess their own name wins.
What these games have in common
Classic games share two things: everyone can join at once, and the rules fit in one sentence. The games on Ludiko start from the same idea: Crowd Guess is about predicting what the group thinks, and Bluff Quiz is about inventing a convincing answer. The screen and the phones keep time and score, and the players are left to laugh.