A game within a game for the holiday

A quick little tale ...

Last Sunday we had a white elephant gift exchange, which is a game of sorts.  People kept calling it "the gift game" or just "the game".  I'm not sure it has an actual name, it's too ephemeral a thing.  Since it does have a rule set, some choices to make, and obvious gains and losses, it does qualify as a game.  Anyway, the rules are simple: some number of people each bring a gift, and numbers are pulled from a "hat" (whatever is convenient).  The first player gets to choose a gift and unwrap it.  After that, each player has the choice to steal any unwrapped gift or open a new one.  When your gift is stolen, you get to open a new one.  When a gift is stolen for a third time, it is out of the game and cannot be stolen again. When everyone has had one turn, the first player has a chance to steal any gift, because they did not get that option the first time around.

Very simple, and full of laughs.  It was surprising how many people started shouting out their own variations of the rules at the end.  I have found that's a hallmark (no pun intended) of a game that is so widely known it has become a family tradition, the fact that so many different groups have added to the rule set.  But we settled for just how I described it.

What was funny about this group is that there were two gifts in the mix which were actually games.  One was one of those headache-inducing party game I don't like, where everyone ends up yelling stuff and getting way too loud.  So I ignored that one.  The other was a two-fer of the Oregon Trail card game (where everyone dies of cholera), and Phase 10, which we already had a copy of.  So, as part of the game, on my turn I stole those two games.  A bit "meta".

Back to the White Elephant "game".  It apparently has lots of other names, and even a site claiming to be the official rules for a thing that is in no way official ... only to see on a very interesting Wikipedia page that the term "white elephant" more properly applies to giving "impractical gifts that are hard to dispose of".  So our exchange of perfectly good gifts wouldn't count, although it was funny watching the gifts that were obviously gift cards get passed by until the last few exchanges.  Really, shouldn't an obvious form of cash be more popular than a jug of hand soap?

Some of the variations I saw floating around the web: 3 swaps and the gift is out, 3 swaps and the PLAYER is out, everyone passes their gift to the left (or right) at the end.  I'm sure there are more.

So, what seemed like a trivial social practice had more twists and turns that I expected.

On to the Oregon Trail soon ...