Hollywood Game Night Party Games

jane lynch hollywood game night
Jane Lynch hosts Hollywood Game Night. courtesy NBC

Whether you're hosting an Oscar Night party or a gathering of movie buffs, the game show Hollywood Game Night offers some terrific games that you can play at home with friends. Many of them can be adjusted to reflect other pop culture themes such as music or literature, and some can even be tailor-made to suit the guest of honor for a birthday or anniversary party.

These are all team games, so you can usually get away with any number of people per team (or opt to have more than two teams).

If you're looking for some entertaining games that haven't been overdone at other parties, try some of these from Hollywood Game Night.

Crunch Time

Crunch Time is known by a few alternative titles depending on the subject matter of the game. Cereal Killer, Candy Bar Investigation, and Home Sweets Home are some of the other names for this one. It's based on tasty snacks, candy, or cereal, and is fairly simple to set up and play.

If you decide to incorporate this game into your celebration, try serving bowls of the same snacks so that everything ties in nicely. Alternatively, offer up packages of the same candies used in the game as prizes for the winning team.

L'il Picassos

This game is especially perfect for gatherings in which most of the attendees are parents with small children. It's also a lot of fun for baby showers. In L'il Picassos, young kids are asked to draw pictures of their favorite celebrities. Then, teams are challenged to figure out who those celebrities are.

Approach the kids of your party guests well before the party and see if you can get them to contribute some artwork for the game. Then offer an extra prize if the parents can guess which picture was drawn by their child.

I Love a Charade

There's not a lot new or different with this game - I Love a Charade is pretty much charades with a movie theme. The fun is in choosing different themes that may be unexpected, and you don't have to stick with movies. Try "Flavors of Birthday Cake" or "Banned Books" or even "Celebrity Baby Names."

Timeline

This is another game that you can change up to suit your party theme. In Timeline, teams must put pictures in chronological order. These pictures can be of people, or movie posters or album covers - just about anything that makes sense.

This game does take a little bit of prep work to set up, but there are some options to help you save time and effort.

Be Kind, Rewind

The key word here is "rewind." For Be Kind, Rewind, the host reads out the plot of a movie - but backward. Then, teams must identify the film and state the name of it in reverse order, taking turns at saying the words in the titles. So if the correct answer was The Lord of the Rings, the team would have to say "Rings the of Lord the" to get the points.

Blockbusters

It'll take you some time to set up the props for Blockbusters, but you can make them out of recyclable materials so it's not expensive to do. Enlist the help of some friends and you'll have it done in no time. For this game, team members are given boxes that have one word on each side. They then have to guess the title of a film based on clues, and then display that title by holding out the correct words on their boxes.

Where Ya Goin'?

In Where Ya Goin'? one person on the team becomes the "driver," while the others are "passengers." The passengers are given locations (real or fictional) from movies (or you could use books) and must describe these places to the driver until he or she guesses it correctly.

You can really play this up with props and scenes, or you can just set it up with a couple of stools and some cue cards. It really depends on how big you want the game to be for the party.

Letter Have It

In Letter Have It, teams must come up with responses based on a given theme or category that all start with the same letter. So if the category was TV Shows and the letter was S, they could respond with Seinfeld, Scoundrel, Scandal, etc.

Grab a bag of Scrabble tiles to randomly choose the letters and have fun with this one!

In Other Words

This is one game that more or less needs to be based on films (unless your guests are Shakespeare buffs). To play In Other Words, one team member gets a famous movie quote and then has to reword it so that none of the words are the same. The rest of the team members then have to guess what the actual quote is. The only prep needed here is to research a bunch of great quotes.

Makeup Artists

This is another game that is best based on films. In Makeup Artists, a movie poster from a little-known film is shown, with the film's title removed. One team gets cards with potential titles for the movie, but one of those cards says "Make Something Up." The other team then has to guess which is the real title.

TV ID

The game TV ID is loosely based on Name That Tune, but for movie titles. One player from each team is shown a film title. They then have to barter to see which one thinks that they can get the rest of their team to name the movie in as few words as possible.

Song Sung Wrong

Song Sung Wrong is based on music rather than films, but if your gathering is movie-centric then you can choose movie theme songs or soundtracks to stay on topic. To play, the host sings a line from a well-known song but butchers the end of the lyric. The teams must then scramble to sing the correct lyric to get points.

Pick one or several of these games to play with your friends, and you'll be partying like the celebrities do in Hollywood!