What it is: An indoor game for groups, best for teens, because it can be kind of flirty. 🙂
Best for: About 15 to 20 players.
What you need: You’ll need an odd number of players (probably at least nine) and as many chairs as your number of players plus one, divided by two (so, if you were playing with nine people, you would need five chairs).
How to play: Set up the game by arranging the chairs in a circle, with enough room behind each chair for someone to stand. Then divide up the players into pairs. A good way to play this game is on group dates with an even number of boys and girls, so each pair would consist of a boy and a girl. (But if you do have an even number of boys and girls, players will have to take turns sitting out because you need an odd number to play.) But you don’t have to play with an even number of boys and girls if you don’t want to.
Each pair then takes a chair, and one of the players sits down while the other player stands behind the chair, with their hands behind their back. So if Roxanne and Mike are a pair, they would sit/stand like this:
All the other players do the same. (If you’re playing with boys and girls, have all the girls sit while the boys stand, or vice versa.) One player will be left without a partner, say it’s Chad:
Poor Chad. The object of the game is for Chad to invite another player to fill the chair in front of him. The girls sitting in the chairs try to move to Chad’s chair (if he invites them), and the boys standing behind the girls try to keep the girls from moving.
Here’s how it works: Chad invites a girl to move to the empty chair in front of him by winking at her. Say he winks at Roxanne. When she sees Chad wink, Roxanne stands up as fast as she can and moves to sit in Chad’s chair. But Mike, standing behind Roxanne, tries to stop Roxanne from leaving by tapping her on the shoulder. If Roxanne can get out of Mike’s reach before he taps her, she’s free to sit in Chad’s chair. But if Mike taps her, she has to sit back down and Chad has to wink at someone else. And here’s the catch for Mike (and all the other boys standing behind girls): He must keep his hands behind his back at all times, and he must look down at Roxanne’s head (not up at Chad’s face).
Say Roxanne does escape to sit in front of Chad – then it’s Mike’s turn to wink at someone else, and the game keeps going on. The boys standing behind the chairs must keep their eyes down, and the girls carefully watch the winker, so they can move quickly when he winks.
After you’ve played a while, switch up the pairs and have the standers sit and the sitters stand behind the chairs (and rotate players in who might be sitting out).
Variations: If you want to shake up the standers and the sitters even more often (and you don’t care about mixing up boys and girls), have a pair switch every time someone occupies a chair. For example, remember when Chad winked Roxanne over? Once she got away from Mike, she and Chad would switch places, so Chad would be in the chair and Roxanne would stand behind it. You could also switch up players every time someone fails to get away (if Mike stopped Roxanne from moving to Chad’s chair, she and Mike would switch spots), or both.
This is also similar to another game my friends and I played often, but the other version is much rougher and involves a lot more physical contact.