The Best Games For A Camping Trip

When you’re off on a camping trip, most of your entertainment and amusement is built into the experience. You get to hang out with friends and/or family; you get to enjoy the outdoors and take in new sights; you even get some exercise, and challenge yourself to get by with limited supplies and luxuries.

Even with all of this to enjoy though, there is some downtime associated with camping. Once you’re done for the night and stuffed on s’mores, it can be nice to have something besides an improvised ghost story to pass the time with. And this is where games come into play.

The following are just a few that are very easy to manage on a camping trip, without needing to pack equipment or set up anything particularly involved.

The Exquisite Corpse Story

Surely you’ve played this game, albeit maybe with a different name. Basically, you write a small portion of a story on a piece of paper and fold the top down so that only the last sentence or line is showing. The next person continues the story for a few sentences based on what’s visible to them, and the paper always gets folded down so that the next person up can only see the last line from the previous writer. When everyone’s written something (sometimes after various rounds), the story is dramatically read out loud. (There is also an online version from Read.gov if you’d like to read one of those out loud and get a better sense of how it all works before your next trip.)

Poker

This is a simple one since all you need is a deck of cards, maybe a paper and pencil for keeping score, and possibly a set of rules and hand rankings in case you and your fellow campers are not a super poker-savvy crowd. Some card decks may come with rules for games included on additional cards; additionally, the free online resource Poker.org has lists of rules for popular varieties of poker, as well as hand rankings you can print off and take with you. So long as you have the instructions and resources you need though, poker offers a great opportunity to pack a lightweight game that never gets old. There are even glow-in-the-dark, waterproof cards that are basically designed for outdoor playing at night!

20 Questions

This is a game for those times when you didn’t bring anything with you at all. In case it’s been a while since you played, remember it’s quite simple: The first player starts with “I’m thinking of a ___” (it can be a person, place, or thing). The other players then take turns asking the first up to 20 yes-or-no questions in total in order to guess what or who the first person was thinking of. You can change the game up as you please –– splitting into teams, having one player guess at a time to keep scores, and so on. But the fundamentals are about as easy as it gets, and it’s a game you can entertain yourselves with for hours.

UNO

If your bonds are strong (or you feel like destroying your friendships), then UNO is a great option. In this game, each player is dealt seven cards. The game starts when the dealer flips the top card from the stack over so it can be seen. Then, moving in a clockwise direction, the next player chooses a card of their own which can be played if it’s the same color or number as the face-up card. If a player cannot play a card, they can draw. If they can play the drawn card, they have to. Otherwise, they keep it in their hand and the next player takes their turn. Once a player gets down to one card left in their hand, they must say “UNO!” If they fail to say anything and another player calls them out, the player with one card left gets penalized by drawing two more cards. The winner is the person who gets rid of their cards first. It’s simple, but it’s fun and competitive, and like poker it requires only that you squeeze a single deck of UNO cards into your pack.

Telephone

This is a classic game a lot of people actually play growing up –– but it’s much more fun when you’re older. Use that widened vocabulary and wiser, older imagination and whisper a message into someone’s ear. As the message gets passed around, it’s bound to turn into something completely different than what it started as. Be ready for some interesting ones, and for a lot of laughs around the campfire.

There are ultimately all kinds of games suitable for a night out camping. But we hope this list has gotten you thinking about some simple, fun options that don’t require much (if anything) in the way of equipment or packing additions. For more camping tips and tricks, visit us again at Forest Heroes sometime soon.