A Christmas party game for adults: dark riddles after dinner
Illustration: The Guest Nobody Invited
After Christmas dinner, everyone is still at the table and nobody wants to unfold a board. That is the moment for a dark riddle: one person knows the story, and everyone else asks yes-or-no questions until they can tell it. There is no box and nothing to set up, and three stories will carry the evening. Here is how to run it.
In this article
Why it works after Christmas dinner
Everyone is already sitting down, and the game is played from your chair. Ages mix easily, because all it takes is a closed question. There is nothing to buy or set up. And whoever drifts back from the kitchen catches up in one sentence: someone sums up what is known, and they ask the next question.
On this site
Before the evening
Pick one or two narrators and give each of them a story to prepare on their own, a few days ahead. No riddle on this site shows its solution: it lives in the app, and the hosting guide covers how to get to it and what to note down.
Plan three stories, from the shortest to the longest. The three riddles at the bottom of this page run from one star to three: one to open over dessert, one for the middle of the evening, and the long one once the table has warmed up.
At the table
Read the statement aloud twice, with no commentary. Then keep the exact words where everyone can see them: every free riddle has its own page on this site with no answer on it, so put it up on the living-room TV or on a phone between the plates. The narrator’s phone stays face down.
During the game
One question at a time, and one answer per question: yes, no or irrelevant. Irrelevant is a real answer: it tells the table a line goes nowhere. Every ten questions or so, someone sums up out loud, or the table forgets what it has already established.
If the table is going round in circles, the narrator can give a hint, one at a time, pointing back to a detail of the statement rather than handing over a fact. And when someone cracks it, let them tell the whole story before you move on.
Dark, not gory: with the family
These stories are about death, even at Christmas. In our riddles the death sets the scene and is never walked through, and the artwork is macabre, never gory. But Christmas often brings several generations to one table: read the statement and the solution before you choose, and if someone at the table is grieving, pick another story.
With teenagers, or grandparents new to the game, start on one star. The stars measure the length of the road, not how dark the story is: the statement is what tells you whether a scene suits your table.
Our Christmas collection
We wrote a collection of original riddles set around Christmas Eve: a chalet cut off by snow, a family dinner, presents by the fire. Each one has a free page on this site that stays up all year. In the app, the collection is only on the shelf in December, until the 25th: that is when to prepare your stories.
