Simple yet exciting! Recommended games and activities for year-end parties
Many of you probably attend several year-end parties—at work, with friends, and in your neighborhood—every year, right?
Looking back on the past year and chatting with colleagues and friends makes for a great time.
And the entertainment games—like bingo and quizzes—might be part of the fun, too.
But when you’re in charge of the entertainment, it can be hard to decide what games to play.
Ideally, you want something simple that everyone can enjoy and get excited about.
In this article, we’ll introduce classic games that meet those needs!
Once you’ve decided on the games for this year’s year-end party, don’t forget to prepare the prizes!
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Simple yet exciting! Recommended games and activities for year-end parties (71–80)
Russian roulette with super-spicy snacks
There’s a segment called the “Ultra-Spicy Challenge” on the NTV variety show Ariyoshi Seminar, and just watching it makes your mouth burn, doesn’t it? These days, even super-spicy vegetables like habaneros, which used to be hard to find, are available at large supermarkets.
Let’s get some mildly spicy snacks and play a Russian roulette game with extra-spicy ones to get everyone hyped! There are plenty of fairly hot snacks on the market, like “Maiko-han Hii Hii Curry Senbei” and “Oni-Kara Kaki no Tane & Peanuts.” But even if things get exciting, make sure not to pressure anyone into it!
Foot Reflexology Thumb Wrestling
Foot reflexology push-hand sumo: super simple yet guaranteed to hype up the crowd! Plus, it’s great for your body.
The key to winning might be how well you can endure the sharp pain.
In a way, it’s like a penalty-game twist: the rules are to play push-hand sumo while standing on a reflexology mat.
Just standing on the knobby mat hurts and is a real challenge.
That’s exactly why the strongest person doesn’t always win—upsets are common, which makes it a lot of fun! Give it a try!
Tasting Game
It’s the game you often see on Japanese variety shows where you’re blindfolded, someone puts food in your mouth, and you have to guess what you’re eating.
You’d think it would be easy, but once you’re blindfolded, it suddenly becomes hard to tell.
If you plug your nose, it gets even harder!
Ball Toss Competition
You know the ball-toss game they do at sports festivals? Let’s do that at the party! Each team picks one person to wear a basket on their head.
Then everyone else just tries to throw as many balls into the basket as possible! If you can’t prepare enough balls, rolled-up newspaper works too.
Coin drop game
Fill a glass with plenty of water, then drop coins into it one by one in turn.
Participants keep repeating this, and the person who makes the water spill from the glass loses.
Using a variety of coins—from 1-yen pieces to 500-yen pieces, with different weights and sizes—makes it more exciting.
Games that involve strategy really get your heart racing, don’t they?
Bingo game
It’s a classic, but how about a bingo game? When everyone gets a prize, the excitement skyrockets! You don’t need extravagant prizes to have fun, either (lol).
These days you can buy bingo cards at 100-yen shops, and even without a bingo machine, you can run it with a smartphone app!
High & Low
In lively situations like year-end parties, simple rules are often more fun.
Here’s a perfect game for such occasions that uses playing card numbers.
Each player has their own deck, and the dealer role rotates in turn.
For each dealer’s card, players guess whether the next card’s number will be higher or lower; if they’re correct, they win the card, and if they’re wrong, the card is discarded to the table.
The player with the most cards at the end wins—simple and easy to understand.
Precisely because the rules are simple, you can also add variations, such as giving certain numbers special effects.
