Dixit

Dixit is a card game played by 3-6 players, the first person to get 30 points wins. To start the game give everyone 6 cards from the deck and assign each player a color. Give them the tiles (1-6) of their color. Every card has a different image on it, on each round one person will say a word or sentence describing a card they have in their hand and place the card face down. Each player will then place a card from their hand that fits the players description. Then shuffle the cards and place them face up, everyone will vote on which card they think was put in by the person who gave the clue. If some people guessed that person’s card, but not everyone, they get 3 points, if everyone or no one guessed their card, they get 0 points. Because of this you can’t make your clue too obvious or too vague. Everyone who guessed their card also gets 1 point, and anyone whose card was guessed and didn’t give the clue gets 1 point.

Here are a few of the many cards in Dixit (hover on image to view):

Codenames

Codenames is a game usually played with four people in teams of two. Your goal is to help your teammate correctly guess words by giving them clues, without them accidently guessing your opponents words. Whichever team guesses all their words first wins. The game starts by setting up a 5×5 grid of cards, each card has one word on it. Then one person from each team looks at a card (they both look at the same card) that says which of the cards on the grid are their words, which are their opponents words, which are neutral, and the one word that is a bomb! The two people looking at this card will take turns giving their teammate clues to guessing the words. When giving a clue you may say any one word that is not on one of the cards, and then a number. The number is how many cards you think your clue works for, and how many your teammate can guess.

Guessed card Result
If your teammate correctly guesses your card Put your color marker on it and they may continue guessing
If they guess your opponent’s card Put their marker on it and end the guessing
If they guess a neutral card Put a grey marker on it and end the guessing
If they guess the bomb Your team looses the game automatically

Scattergories

How To Play Scattergories

Scattergories is a game where you answer questions in a short period of time competing against your friends. Every round you will deicide what set of questions you all will be answering. Then you roll the letter die, whatever letter you get, must be the first letter in the words that everyone uses to answer their questions. Then flip the hourglass and begin writing down your answers to the six questions, remember, all your answers must begin with the letter you rolled. You have until the hour glass runs out to answer the questions. After everyone writes their answers you compare to everyone else, if any two people wrote the same answer to a question, they don’t get the points for that question, that means you can get 0-6 points every round. At the end of the game add up all your scores from the rounds, the person who got the most points wins.

Here is an example of some of the questions on the cards:

hover over this image to see it:
scattagories

Beginner’s Guide to Spades

Baisics

Spades is a card game played by four people in teams of two. Your objective is to get 500 points before the other team. Every round the dealer will deal 13 cards to each player (the whole deck) and players will begin to bid starting left of the dealer. You bid the number of rounds you think you will win, AKA tricks. After all players have bid the person to the left of the dealer plays a card and the other people must play a card that has the same suit as that card. If someone doesn’t have a card with the same suit they may play any card. Then the person with the highest card wins the round AKA trick, and they take the four cards. The only cards that can not be played first in a round are the spades, spades can not lead until they have been broken. This means you cant play them first unless someone has already played them in a previous round, if they didn’t have the suit that someone led with. At the end of a round to see who takes a trick, spades are higher than any other suit, so even if there is an ace of hearts, a two of spades would win the trick.

Scoring

At the end of every round you and your partner will score your points together. If you both got a total of less tricks than you both bid you loose 10x the number that you both bid. A bid of nil, AKA 0, counts as -100 if you get a single trick. If you and your partner get more than you bid, you get that many bags. Bags are 1 point, but if you get 10 bags you loose 100 points, so when bidding you want to be precise, because there are consequences for overbidding, and underbidding.