Games to Liven Up the Freshers’ Welcome Party
It’s hard to decide what games to play at a welcome party for new students, isn’t it? Everyone’s meeting for the first time or feeling nervous, and it’s hard to know what will get people excited.
So here, we’ll introduce games that are likely to liven up a new-student welcome party.
We’ve included plenty of games that help you learn everyone’s names and encourage communication.
We’ve focused on games that everyone can enjoy, even those who aren’t comfortable with self-introductions or speaking in front of others.
Most of them don’t require any props, so feel free to give them a try!
- Break the ice with intros and team battles! Party games to spice up your welcome event
- [For University Students] A Roundup of Fun Games and Recreational Activities
- Fun games recommended for making friends with people you’ve just met
- A fun, everyone-joins-in game that gets everyone excited!
- Party games that get everyone excited at school
- Party games collection that get everyone excited in a big group
- Office party games that get everyone excited
- A great way to get to know each other! Entertainment and performances to liven up a welcome party
- [Doable at School!] Fun Punishment Game Ideas That Will Hype Up High Schoolers
- Games that liven up social and networking gatherings
- [From small to large groups] Drinking games recommended for college students
- [For Kids] Popular party games. Fun games that get everyone excited
- Recommended for college students! Punishment game ideas that will make everyone laugh and hype things up
[New Student Welcome] Games to Liven Up the Welcome Party (1–10)
Introducing someone else
If you’re tired of introducing yourself, try doing a “tako-shokai” (introducing someone else)! As the name suggests, you introduce a person other than yourself—but you might wonder, how can you do that when you’ve only just met? To introduce someone else, you need to gather information.
Before the introduction, set a time and draw out as much information from the other person as possible.
Then summarize it and present them as, “This person is the kind of person who…” You’ll have to convey that information to yet another person, which is surprisingly challenging! But it’s a great way to get to know each other better, making it perfect for welcome events.
Body Clock Game
The “Is Your Body Clock Accurate? Game,” which relies solely on your own sense of time, is exactly what it sounds like: trust your internal clock and measure 30 seconds.
Participants will be blindfolded.
The host will start the stopwatch on the cue.
Participants should raise their hand when they believe 30 seconds have passed.
The person who raises their hand most accurately wins.
The longer the duration, the higher the difficulty, so you can start with shorter intervals and gradually make them longer.
Finding commonalities
A game where you look for commonalities and have fun: the Common Ground Hunt.
Set a time limit of about three minutes, and during that time, talk within your group or pair to see how many things you share in common.
The group or pair that finds the most commonalities wins.
Even though the time is short, you’ll need plenty of conversation to draw out those common points.
Finding commonalities not only brings people closer, but the act of conversing itself also helps build rapport.
If the team that couldn’t find many common points gets a lighthearted penalty to help them bond more, the activity gets even more exciting!
[Welcome Event] Games to Liven Up the Freshers’ Welcome Party (11–20)
fast typing on a smartphone
A game that favors people who are used to smartphones: the Smartphone Speed Typing Challenge! The rules are simple—compete to see who can finish typing a given prompt on their smartphone the fastest.
Using predictive text is allowed, but if you want to raise the difficulty, you can ban predictive text.
Line breaks and punctuation must match the prompt exactly.
For those from the feature phone generation, fast typing on a smartphone might be tough, but younger people whose first phone was already a smartphone might have the edge with their mastery of flick input and everything else.
No matter how fast you finish, typos will cost you points.
It’s a game you can play anytime as long as you have a smartphone—why not try it during some downtime at a welcome event?
Icebreaker Bingo
To get to know each other at a welcome event, it’s important to learn everyone’s names first, right? A great activity for that is Intro Bingo.
In regular bingo you use a card with numbers, but here you write the names of the participants in the spaces instead.
The host should prepare a set of slips with all participants’ names in advance.
Then, just like regular bingo, the host draws a slip; if the name drawn matches one you’ve written on your card, you mark that spot.
If you complete a line vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, you get bingo! Another variation is to write your favorite things on the card and mark a spot whenever you match with someone else—also a fun way to do Intro Bingo!
Truth or Lie Game
Friends you’ve spent time with up to now—how well do you all really know each other? At a thank-you party or graduation celebration, why not liven things up with a game that helps you reaffirm your bonds? The “Two Truths and a Lie” game is, in short, an icebreaker: each person gives four statements about themselves, but one of them includes a lie.
Everyone else listens and tries to figure out which statement is the lie.
“You had that side to you?” “We’ve been together all this time and I never knew!”—it’s a great way to deepen your connections.
Perfectly Choo-Choo
Set a “drink up to here” line on a glass and, while blindfolded, see if you can drink to exactly that line—Pittari Choo-Choo! It’s a party game that’s easy to get everyone excited about, and you get tasty juice too.
For the blindfold, we recommend a fun, quirky eye mask.
That way, even though the challenger is dead serious, it looks hilarious to the audience and everyone can enjoy it together.
If no one hits it exactly, the person closest to the line wins.
You can easily set the line using a rubber band.
