Musical Chairs – 4 Different Party Games
Supplies: Chairs, music, someone to man the music
Musical Chairs is a classic game that kids start playing at a young age, but it is a game you can play at almost any age. We enjoy musical chairs and offer up Musical Chair variations so you can change things up.
Basic: Musical Chairs
Line up alternate facing chairs, one less than the number of children playing. The players move round the chairs while the music is playing. When the music stops they have to sit down on a free chair, the player without a chair is out, take away one chair each time, repeat until you have 2 players and 1 chair the one to sit down first is the winner.
Advanced Musical Chairs
This fun variation of musical chairs is set up just like normal musical chairs but with additional fun thrown in. Start the music and have the children walk in a circle around the chairs, until you stop the music. When the music stops, each participant tries to sit in one of the chairs.
** The player left standing must pull the name of an animal, written on a piece of paper, out of a hat. Then, they must act it out while the other guests try to guess what the animal is. Start the music again and repeat the game until all the animals in the hat have been acted out.
Upset the Fruit Basket – Musical Chairs variation
It’s a variation of musical chairs and works well with large groups 10 or more. Get a group of people to put their chairs in a ring. Just like musical chairs.
Each group (5 – 6 people) is named after a fruit, like apples, bananas, etc…
To start everyone is sitting and the host calls out apples and only the apples have to stand up and walk around the circle. While they are walking a chair is removed.
Now when the host says apples again, the apples have to scramble for the remaining chairs. This continues with the other fruit groups as well.
However every once in a while, you yell upset the fruit basket all fruits must stand up and you can either remove 1 chair from each fruit group or you can remove an entire fruit group!.
So say there are 4 fruits groups of 2, 3, 3, and 4 people. You remove the 2 chair group “cherries” and the cherries must now join a new fruit group. This is a way that you can keep the groups pretty large and when needed combine groups. And once you get down to 2 groups with 2 people just Upset the basket and create a circle of 3 chairs so you only eliminate one person per round.
The winner of course is the last fruit in the basket.
Round and Round – Musical Chairs Twist
Supplies: Pieces of construction paper 1 per player, (all same color except one), music
* This musical chairs adaptation replaces chairs with paper squares and offers variations for young kids so there is no pushing and shoving. Suggested 3 – 7 yrs.
This game can be adapted to any party theme with colors and music. Place the pieces of construction paper on the floor in the shape of a circle with space in between each one.
Now each child goes and stands on (beside is recommend, so that the paper doesn’t rip) a piece of construction paper and when the music starts playing each child steps to the next square (piece of construction paper) this continues until the music stops. When the music stops the person on the odd colored paper or sad face is out of the game. Now remove a piece of construction paper and continue the game. Continue this pattern until you get down to a winner.
** Variation:
Often you will find that the children will wise up and start avoiding the odd colored paper, trying to jump over it and sometimes pushing to get kids to move so they can remain in the game.
Well there is a way to eliminate that, number each piece of paper 1 to the number of guests.
Now when the music stops, each child stands on the numbered square and you randomly draw a number out of a hat to determine who is out of the game.
This way there is no unlucky square or space, rather every square can be lucky or unlucky.
