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)
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!
Name Bingo
Name Bingo is a great recommendation for occasions like the company year-end party where employees from other departments also gather.
First, ask the people nearby for their names and fill in the blanks on your bingo card.
Then the host draws slips of paper with participants’ names; if the name is on your card, mark it, and when you complete a line—bingo! Since you have to ask many people for their names before the game even starts, it’s an activity that helps build connections during that time as well.
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.
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!
Treasure Hunt Game
It’s a game where you put slips of paper with “winner” written on them inside balloons, and whoever pops a balloon and gets that slip receives a prize (the treasure).
You can pop them any way you like—poke them with something or even pop them by stepping on them.
You can also include dummy slips or ones that assign a penalty game.
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.
One Night Werewolf
Introducing the party game “One Night Werewolf,” perfect for year-end gatherings with friends and family.
It’s easy to play in a smartphone or computer browser, and supports 3 to 8 players.
The game starts with cards.
If you’re holding a Werewolf card, pretend to be human and avoid getting found out.
If you’re holding a Human card, your goal is to identify and eliminate the werewolf—but be careful not to target your own team! The simple rules are part of the charm, making it a game anyone can enjoy, regardless of age.
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?
Bilibili Shock Game
The “biri-biri” in the Biri-Biri Shock Game refers to that electric zing! The gist of this game is a gadget that sends an electric current like Russian roulette.
Each person holds a handle that can deliver a shock, and music plays first.
When the music stops, a current may flow—or you might be safe and feel nothing.
The exact settings depend on the device, but either way it really gets your heart racing.
It could also work as a punishment in other games for the loser (lol).
Of course, it’s fun even without using it as a penalty.
Get ready for guaranteed laughs from reactions you don’t normally see!
after-the-fact rock-paper-scissors
You don’t need to prepare anything, and you can enjoy this during small breaks at a year-end party: it’s “after-the-fact rock-paper-scissors.” You play rock-paper-scissors, then respond after seeing the other person’s hand to intentionally lose or win.
It sounds simple, but the longer it goes on, the more your mind gets confused.
Decide in advance whether you’ll lose or win after the fact, and if you play the correct hand accordingly, you score points.
Compete to see who can successfully play after-the-fact the most and rack up the highest score.
Have a great time!
