Trash or Treasures Family Reunion Game

Trash or Treasure is a fun game for your whole family, indoors or outdoors and it can be adapted to all family reunion themes.

White Elephant Gift

Have everyone bring a “trashy” white elephant gift. These could be a mostly used bar of soap, a comb with missing teeth, tacky old jewelry, a boring movie, an outgrown toy, a broken anything- whatever you consider TRASH. (My Mom once brought a delicious looking box of chocolates but she took a bite out of each candy.)

Treasures

Gather a few packages that contain treasures: These are things that you should provide such as gift certificates, movie pass, candy bar, DVD, homemade cookies, a roll of dimes etc.

Encourage everyone to wrap their gift creatively using fancy gift wrap, aluminum foil, newspaper, comics, wallpaper, brown bags, gift bags or whatever they have on hand.

To play the game everyone should sit in a circle. Pile all of the packages in the center of the circle.

Before beginning the game stress the need to be fast and accurate.

· Have one pair of dice for every five or six players.

· Keep passing dice to the left. Players take turns trying to roll a six – not a combination of dots that add to six on both dice but six dots on one die.

· When they roll a six they may grab one package from the pile and open it; double sixes let them grab two packages to open.

· Dice move around rapidly and before long more than one player is diving for the same package.

· Once all the presents are gone from the center, rolling a six allows them to steal packages from neighbors. The robbing is the favorite and funniest part of the game.

· The “stealing” part of the game should only last a few minutes. Everyone will want to steal the “treasures”!

NOTE: The younger children in your family won’t understand why they got a “trash” present and may be upset. I always have something to trade with them like a dollar store prize or a 2-liter bottle of soda.