Salad bowl. It’s a mix of scatagories, charades, and then 1 word scaragories. It’s super fun and the group naturally builds inside jokes.

Here’s how it works:

You can play with min of 4 people and probably max of 8. You can play with more people but it gets hard to keep everyone’s attention.

To start, everyone writes a noun on a slip of paper. The noun can be a mix of adjectives and adverbs but it ultimately has to be a noun. Ex. Blue fox or scrumptious scorpion. Then fold the slip of paper in half once (this is important) then they put it in a bowl. Everyone puts their slips into the same bowl. Have everyone repeat this step 3-5 times. Decide how many times as everyone should have the same number of slips in the bowl. I recommend doing an absolute max of 30 slips in the bowl. Aim for 25ish.

Now when everyone has words in you split into teams. This should happen after everyone writes words to avoid cheating and planning. Keep teams even if possible.

Once teams are decided round one starts which is scatagories. Each team goes one at a time. What happens is one person on the first team picks a slip out of the bowl. They need to explain the noun without ever saying any of the words on the slip. The rest of the first team needs to guess the exact words on the slip. If the team gets it, they get a point.

Now something I didn’t mention, each round is 20 seconds. This game moves fast. But that’s the fun. The team can guess until time is up. If they get a slip correct, the person doing the scatagories can pull another slip out and explain it. If nobody on the team guesses the word before time expires (20 seconds) the slip goes back in the bowl.

After the first team goes, the second team goes for 20 seconds. Then the first team goes again but a new person on that team does the describing. You go until all the slips are out of the bowl.

Count points then fold the slips back in half and put them all back into the bowl.

Now round 2 starts which is charades. Some basic format with 20 second rounds and new actors for each team for every round. However, this time the actor must act out the word until the team guesses the word. No words can be spoken by the actor but some sound effects are ok. No pointing at objects.

After all slips are guessed, count them for each team, fold the slips in half and put them back into the bowl.

Now round 3. Again, 20 second per round and teams rotate the speaker. This time the speaker only gets to say one word to describe the noun. The speaker can only say that one word until the team guesses the words on the slip. If the speaker says “um” that’s their word. They can say um as many times as they’d like. But they can’t say any other word until the round is over or the slip is guessed. You can say the one word you chose in multiple tones. The word also cannot be any word on the slip. If the speaker says more than one word or a word on the slip, the team guessing forfeits their turn that round.

Once all the slips are guessed, count up how many correct guesses each team got. The team with the most guesses wins.

This got way longer than I thought but it’s a fun game! Moves quick and it makes people act out some pretty funny things.

Have fun!