4 Fun Gift Exchange Games for Small Groups

Planning a small holiday get-together might be easier than planning a large one, but it does come with its own challenges. One of those is how to incorporate favorite holiday activities that seem better suited to larger crowds. Gift exchanges are a prime example.

A standard White Elephant gift exchange is best with a group of six or more people. Any less than that, and there might be too few options for choosing (and stealing) gifts. Also, fewer people means fewer turns, the result being that the gift swap is over before you can say “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

But if you’re reading this, you already know the pitfalls of running a gift exchange with just a handful of players. What you want are some solutions. Here are some gift exchange games that are geared to a smaller, more intimate gathering.

Secret Santa

For a small group of friends or family members who know each other well, Secret Santa is just about perfect. Without getting into too many details (you can find the full “official” rules here), it’s a gift swap where each participant buys for one other person and leaves clues as to their identity. The game concludes with each person opening their gift and attempting to guess who their Secret Santa is based on those aforementioned clues.

This guessing game is a lot more interesting when you know most of the other people well. Of course, it can be too easy if players aren’t careful with their hints. However, well thought-out clues could refer to shared experiences and obscure things that only friends would know, without making the Secret Santa’s identity too obvious.

The downside is that the guessing part of Secret Santa, which happens at your little gathering, doesn’t last any longer than a typical gift exchange. That said, the lead up to this finale can stretch on for weeks, with players leaving clues and token gifts. In other words, whether this is a good option for you just depends on what you’re looking for.

Modified White Elephant

White Elephant has roughly a zillion rules variations, some of which make it work better for smaller groups. In general, the idea is to add extra steps to the game so it’s not over so quickly. A good example of this is White Elephant Bingo (click here for instructions and printables), which has participants play Bingo to determine who gets to take the next turn.

Other rules variations make it possible for players to take multiple turns. These involve things like dice or special cards that limit what each player can do on a given turn. There are oodles of options here, some of which you can find in my article on White Elephant with a twist.

Favorite Things Party

Okay, I’m cheating a little here, because this isn’t a game per se. In a Favorite Things party, each person brings one or more of their favorite items to share with each other member of the group. It’s a sort of bonding experience that can also expose people to new products, food, drinks, and whatnot that they’ve been missing out on.

The brilliant thing – and the reason I feel justified in including this non-game in the list – is that this activity works well for even the tiniest groups. In fact, the smaller the group, the more each person can spend on the cool stuff they want to share with their friends. The real activity here is the conversation that happens when people discover new things and learn more about their friends.

Another option along the same lines is the Christmas Cookie Exchange. Here, each person brings a dozen (or a half-dozen, or whatever) of their favorite Christmas cookies, along with copies of the recipe they used to make them. Each person walks away well-stocked with Christmas goodies.

Pass the Gift

There are a few different games that involve people sitting in a circle and passing gifts around, and they all work well for groups of different sizes. That’s because there are no turns and the length of the game is set by whatever mechanism you’re using to have players pass their gifts. One example is the Left-Right game, which prompts players to pass their gifts to the left or right based on cues in a Christmas-themed story (for an example and printable, click here).

Another option is to roll a pair of dice. One die determines the direction the gifts are passed (1-3 = right, 4-6 = left). The other determines the number of times it’s passed (1-3 = one space, 4-6 = 2 spaces). With a few tweaks, you can turn this into a full-fledged gift swap, as I write about in this post. There’s also a goofy game along these lines that uses both dice and oven mitts.

The downside of gift-passing games is that they don’t work well for very small groups. Once you get down to three or four people, there’s a high likelihood of people ending up with their own presents. Plus, passing gifts around such a small circle frankly seems a bit goofy.

As you can see, you don’t need a big or even a medium-sized crowd to run a holiday gift exchange. I hope one of these ideas works for your little gathering. Best of luck, and Merry Christmas!