A dinner party can be quite a small event both for the people attending and the hosts. Some people used a dinner party to introduce a new dish the discovered, show pictures from their recent overseas vacation, or help to introduce their groups of friends to each other. For the most part a dinner party is a small affair and the intimacy helps to foster the feeling of trying something new or meeting new people. The easy part of a dinner party is deciding on the menu. After all, the menu is the reason you decided to have a dinner party in the first place. Even the pre-dinner festivities can be simple and, by providing a few cocktails and hors d’ouvres, can usually take care of themselves. The difficult part is what to do when dinner is over, everyone is winding down from eating, no one really wants to leave just yet, and they are looking to their hosts for entertainment. This is a good time to start some good dinner party games to break the ice and get the conversation going.

Dinner party games need to be simple, fun, and something that a large group can play. Of course there is always charades which is a dinner party staple. There are other games you can introduce to get the party going and they are relatively inexpensive but yet a lot of fun for a large group. Remember that your goal here is to get the group going and get the energy flowing. You need dinner party games that can accomplish that.

Let me start of by saying that Trivial Pursuit is a horrible party game. If you want to introduce a trivia game then choose something that deals is a specific topic or does not ask questions that you need an encyclopedia to answer. Trivial Pursuit questions tend to be too difficult and cause many anxious minutes of dead silence as someone tries very hard to not look like an idiot while answering a PhD level question. On the other hand, the series of trivia games called Scene It are ideal for dinner parties. Scene It games deal with a variety of topics and use your DVD player to give the questions. We played the classic movie version of Scene It at one of our recent parties and it was a huge success. The questions are interesting but not impossible and the DVD adds a dimension to the game that many people enjoy.

One of the more popular dinner party games that I would highly recommend is Pictionary. Pictionary is a game where you split the room into two teams and then one person from each team tries to draw pictures on paper as clues to their teammates to guess a word they were given. It is great fun to watch someone trying to draw a picture of the word valor. The more tired people get the more fun, and loud, this game becomes.

A game that not many people think of as a dinner party game, but has done quite well at parties I have been to, is Jenga. Jenga is a game where you stack a group of wooden blocks into a tower shape. Then you have to remove the blocks one at a time. The person that removes a block and causes the tower to fall is the loser. I have seen dinner parties play Jenga for hours in a tournament type setting. One person would lose the round and they would sit out. The last person to lose a round won the game. It caused a lot of excitement and people had a great time playing.

Dinner parties can be great fun if you know how to keep them going after dinner is served. Dinner party games will help you keep the guests happy, and the laughs going, for hours.