The holidays are the time of the year when time moves really really slowly. It’s lovely to spend some days with your friends and family if you can. Maybe you are even back in your hometown. But you basically spend your days eating, watching telly and waiting for the next meal (unless you are the unlucky one who prepares all the meals, then you are stuck in the kitchen for days).
To avoid falling into a hole of boredom I feel like playing games this year. Any game will do – no matter if it’s a complicated board game, a simple game of cards, scrabble or just a huge puzzle. I’m actually really into Monopoly, but I will also be ok with UNO. Anything so we can avoid watching the Helene Fischer show on ARD…
But what if you don’t have any of those games at home? Well, we have a solution for that! We thought up a few games for you that you can simply print out at home on a regular A4 sheet. Now let the games begin…
Like A Berliner Bingo
How about a game of bingo with your family? This is such an easy one that even your grandma can join (if she is joining this year at all). We dug through our Like A Berliner book that we made with Sophia Halamoda and picked our favorites words from various chapters and put them in a game of Bingo. You can download the game as a PDF and print it out at home (it has 30 different bingo cards so you can play it all day long).
Stadt Land Fluss (Berlin Edition)
The popular German word game (that could doesn’t really have an English name but is close to Scattergories) requires a little more brainpower as you have to come up with words in different categories starting with a certain letter that has to be picked at random for each round. Instead of City, Country, River we picked some more Berlin-related categories – but if this is too hard for you feel free to change it to more simple ones like in the original game. You can download a playing sheet here and print one for every player.
The Challenge Lottery
This game requires more DIY skills and creativity on your part. The idea is to create a lot of little cards with different challenges written on them that players have to draw one by one at random. You can just create these cards by writing the challenges on little pieces of paper, fold them and throw them in a bowl. The challenges can be different things but should be custom-tailored to what your specific group of players will feel comfortable to answer (don’t put sex questions in there if you play with your parents unless you’re ready to hear the answers…). The challenges can be hard or easy, can be questions, physical challenges, telling secrets or anecdotes, charades or other performances, poems or songs, whatever you can think of.
Happy holidays and enjoy the games!
