Baby Shower Charades

This classic game of charades is played with a twist: all the activities listed down that are to be acted out and guessed are associated with maternity, parenthood, childbirth, child raising, and pregnancy. This is one sure way to bring out the kid in the grown-up!

Two competing teams must guess, through pantomiming, what a certain word or phrase is. The only clue they have is that the actions concern babies!

Each team should volunteer someone to take the challenge of acting out the terms. Beforehand, a list of phrases should be prepared. The terms should be written down on slips of paper which should be folded or rolled up and placed in a large container.

The volunteer should pick a slip of paper, read it, and hand it back to the host. Without saying anything and just making actions, the guest should be able to let the team guess the term that they had read. There is a time limit, though. The guest has 30 seconds to prepare and think and just two minutes to get them to understand what he's read.

The fun here actually, is watching the volunteer go through all the actions, not really guessing the phrase itself. That's why the volunteer is usually called the victim in this game! After all, they're usually put on the spot here and it's the rare guest that actually volunteers for the honor. And it's a lot more fun in a couples shower where the men take their turn, too. The teams take turns in guessing the terms, whether they are successful or not.

Your list of terms can look like this:

changing the diaper
bathe the baby
bottle feed the baby
baby's first steps
giving birth
preparing baby food
breastfeeding
going into labor
water breaking

You can have several variations on this game – for example, you can make it easier on the “volunteers” by color coding the terms based on the categories they are in. Blue paper could mean sleeping time, yellow paper could mean eating time and pink paper could mean lullabies.

Or, the volunteers could be allowed to use their voices to mimic baby sounds (still no words allowed!) while making gestures with their hands. Acting talents really become obvious here!

Yet another variation on this game is to let the opposing team come up with the action the other team is to guess. That eases the preparation on the host's side but is a lot more challenging for the other team. The competitive spirit really comes out here when one team tries to out-do the other in outrageous terms and actions.

The winning team is the one that gets the highest number of guesses right. Keep the points to a certain limit – say, the first team to reach 15 points is the one that wins the whole game.

You could also give prizes for certain categories like the funniest volunteer, the fastest team to guess a term, the most original actions to get a term guessed, and so on. After all, the acting is half the fun!