How many times have you been to a party where it starts extremely slow? Everyone is waiting for the rest of the guests to arrive. Many times they become bored and consider leaving early. As the host you are probably counting on your guests socializing together while you finish the last few touches of preparation for your party. Unfortunately that doesn’t always happen as they are either shy, or just have no interest in socializing with the other guests that are there at the time. Here is a game to keep guests occupied while waiting for everyone to arrive.
This does require one minor amount of planning ahead of time. When inviting your guests, ask them all to bring a roll of pennies to the party. Don’t tell them what the roll of pennies is for ahead of time, just say it will be used as part of a game during the party and every guest needs to bring one. When guests arrive make sure they have their roll of pennies with them. You will then hand them a scoring sheet for their roll of pennies. The scoring sheet is identical for each guest.
On the scoring sheet set up certain criteria for how pennies will score points. Have categories such as a penny with the current year’s date on it, and have that worth the fewest amount of points, such as one point. Then have the biggest point value be the penny out of the guests with the oldest date on it. Make that something like 30 points. Then start to come up with other categories for scoring. In general do them by date, with every five years away from this year being worth an additional point. You can also have a scoring category for multiple pennies from the same year. If you have five pennies from the same year have them score ten points combined. Six would score twelve points combined. If someone has a lucky roll that has ten pennies from the same year, give them a special bonus of 75 points.
Here is the trick though, each penny in the roll can only be used for one scoring category. After everyone has arrived, let everyone nominate what they think is their shiniest and dirtiest penny, it’s ok if these scored in other categories already. Let everyone vote. Whoever wins each category gets a bonus twenty points. At the end of the voting, have everyone total up their points. Whoever has the most points is declared the winner. For the winner have a small door prize such as a gift certificate to a local restaurant or fast food restaurant in the area.
Other variations of this game can be played as desired. Obviously one would be changing the value of the roll of coins. If you want to make it a roll of nickels, dimes, or quarters it’s up to you. I recommend that you let everyone know the coins will be considered a “donation” to the host for having the party after the contest is over. Ideally the gift certificate should be close to the total value of the coins from all the guests.
