How to host a game night (part two)

Since my wildly popular blog post on last-minute holiday parties in December, I’ve hosted several more game nights, with different people and varying levels of spontaneity. Although they’ve all been highly successful, sometimes I still have to repeat the same last minute scramble for guests…somehow, though, God comes through for me.

You’d think that the best case scenario is if I had confirmed attendance a week ahead of time, but with fickle millennials nowadays I actually just want confirmation 6-12 hours in advance. And to be fair to millennials, last-minute cancellations are just more likely for people who confirm a week (versus a day) ahead of time.

Thankfully, for my last game night I had 5 friends confirmed 6 hours in advance, so I was feeling pretty good about myself. Then a random Facebook friend (let’s call her Jenn) messaged me out of the blue to tell me that she enjoyed reading my holiday party blog post. I immediately thought of inviting her….which brings me to one of my main tenets on hosting a successful game night —

Know your audience. My stream of consciousness thought process went something like this: “I know everybody else through playing volleyball, and she doesn’t play volleyball, so I wonder if that’d be a good fit. Well, not everybody knows each other anyway, and we’re not playing volleyball, so I think it’d be fine. More importantly, she’s nice and I think she’d be fun to play games with. Plus, it’s pretty cool that I’m hosting a game night the same day she messaged me about my blog post on hosting a game night.”

So I invited her, and gave her a heads-up that we’d be playing Codenames. Jenn liked the game and was free, so she agreed to come. This brings me to my second point —

Know your games. It’s imperative to have a good feel for what games people like to play. That 3-hour strategy game you just got for Christmas and really want to try with coworkers you’re hosting for the first time? Bad idea. Always start with an easy and quick party game to get the mood going, and from there you can gauge what type of games people want to play. These days I tend to play more party games if people are coming over for the first time, and move on to strategy games only if people are up for it. It’s also helpful to notice/know what games people don’t like. For this particular game night, I knew we’d be playing Codenames quite a bit, so I didn’t invite one of my good friends who doesn’t like Codenames.

Early on in the night Jenn confessed that she actually hates playing games, but decided to come because she liked Codenames. Later, I found out she had a bad game night experience when her friends subjected her to a complicated game and essentially violated both aforementioned principles — know your audience and know your games.

Needless to say, since I’m very familiar with these two principles, Jenn had a great time at my game night (as did everyone else). In addition to Codenames, we played Saboteur, Set, and Wits & Wagers until after midnight. To me, this is what game night is all about: bringing random Facebook friends together, and changing somebody’s mind about how fun games can be.

Caption: I love this photo since it shows how engaged everybody is. Here we are playing Set, an easy, quick, but surprisingly challenging game on finding sets of 3 cards with the same or different attributes (color, shape, fill, number).

Caption: This was one of those game nights where I had to pray for people to show up at the last second…but people did and it was, as per usual, super fun. Also, if you can’t tell, I love taking group photos.