“Turkey!” “Mashed potatoes!” “Gravy!” “No — wait — rolls!”

Four people are shouting at once, the timer is draining, and somebody’s aunt has just stood up to shout “PIGS IN BLANKETS” at close range into a teenager’s face. That is the Christmas Blurt It Out game working exactly as intended.

It takes about ninety seconds to explain to a room full of relatives you have not seen since last December. It needs no board, no app and no batteries. And unlike most party games that quietly fall apart once you mix grandparents with seven-year-olds, this one gets funnier the more wildly mismatched your group is. That is the whole trick of it, and it is why it has become a fixture at Christmas tables.

I have written this as the complete kit rather than a quick explanation. Below you will find the rules, a scoring system that actually resolves the “but I said it first” argument, forty tiered category cards with more than 280 answers you can play from this page without printing anything, formats for two people up to forty-plus, versions for every age mix at the table, a prize table by budget, a troubleshooting chart for the six things that reliably go wrong, and a printable score pad.

Read the rules once, then jump straight to the category cards and start playing. Everything you need is in one place, and nothing needs to be bought.

What the Blurt It Out game actually is

Blurt It Out is a category-guessing game built on a single, very old idea: give a team a subject, start a clock, and let them shout whatever comes into their heads until the time runs out. You have almost certainly played a version of it. The mechanic descends from the classic commercial word-blurting board games where a reader announces a topic and everyone races to name the things on the hidden list before the timer drains.

What makes the Christmas version worth a whole article is the theme. A Christmas category gives every player in the room a shared body of knowledge to draw on — songs, films, food, decorations, family rituals, that one advert everyone remembers — so nobody is disadvantaged by being younger, older, or less well read. A child of seven and a grandparent of seventy both know what a candy cane is.

The shape of a single round

One team reads a category aloud. The other team shouts answers for sixty seconds. The reading team crosses off correct answers on the card as they hear them. Then the teams swap. That is the entire game loop, repeated until you run out of cards or patience.

Two things make it more than a shouting match. First, the card is the referee. Answers are judged against a written list, not against whoever shouts loudest, which removes the single biggest source of family argument. Second, the timer is the equaliser. Slow thinkers are not penalised for being slow; they are penalised for being slow and quiet, which is a different and much funnier failing.

What you need, and what you genuinely do not

The full equipment list is a timer, a set of category cards, and something to keep score on. That is it. You do not need a board, a mat, tokens, a spinner, a phone app, a printer if you would rather read from a screen, or a single purchase of any kind.

If you are playing in the next ten minutes, use the print-and-play cards further down this page or simply read categories off a phone. If you are hosting a bigger party and want something that feels like a proper boxed game, the guidance in the card design section will get you a set you can print, laminate and bring out every December for years.

Why this game works when other party games flop

Most Christmas party games fail for one of four reasons. They need a fixed number of players. They need everyone to be roughly the same age. They take twenty minutes to explain. Or they reward whoever has played before. Blurt It Out avoids all four, and it does so structurally rather than by accident.

It has no correct number of players

Two teams of two works. So does six teams of five. Because teams take turns rather than everyone playing simultaneously, adding players does not slow the game down — it just makes each turn louder. A party that swells from eight guests to twenty as the evening goes on does not need the game reset; you simply rebalance the teams at the next round.

The scoring is decided by the card, not by the room

Ask a family to settle a dispute over whether “gravy” counts as a Christmas dinner food and you will lose fifteen minutes of the evening to it. The card settles it in a second. This sounds like a small design detail and it is in fact the reason the game survives a whole evening with relatives.

Everybody knows the answers, but nobody can reach them fast

The joy of the game is not knowledge. It is retrieval under pressure. Every adult at that table knows that yule log is a Christmas dessert, and roughly half of them will be unable to produce the phrase within the sixty seconds because a different part of their brain is busy screaming “BAUBLE!” at the ceiling. The gap between what people know and what they can reach in time is where all the laughter lives.

It fills the dead hour after dinner

There is a specific block of a Christmas evening — plates cleared, nobody ready to move, nobody willing to start a full board game — that Blurt It Out fills almost perfectly. Rounds are short enough that people can drift in and out, and loud enough that nobody drifts far. You can play four rounds in twenty minutes and then stop, or run it for an hour between courses. It bends to the evening rather than demanding the evening bend to it.

How to play, step by step

The rules below take about ninety seconds to read aloud to a room. Read them once, then put the page down and play — you will not need to refer back.

Before the first round: the setup

1. Split into two teams. Aim for balanced experience rather than balanced age. One strong player on each side is better than one strong team. For every setup variation, see team formats.
2. Give each team a score pad and a pencil. One team scores on its own turn; designating a single scorekeeper for the whole game is faster but more prone to “errors”.
3. Deal out the category cards, face down. Put the stack in the middle of the table. Shuffle so nobody knows what is coming.
4. Set the timer to sixty seconds and check everyone can hear it. A timer that beeps matters more than one that is precise, because the beep is what stops arguments about whether time was up.
5. Agree the round count. Six rounds takes about twenty minutes. Decide this now so the game has an ending rather than trailing off when people get tired.

Running a round

1. Team A draws a card and becomes the reader. Team A reads the category aloud — clearly, once, to the whole room. No hints, no sound effects, no acting it out and no mouthing words.
2. Team B becomes the guessers. As soon as the category is spoken, start the sixty-second timer.
3. Team B shouts. Any member of Team B can call out an answer at any time. There is no turn order within the team and no penalty for a wrong guess — you can guess as many times as you like.
4. Team A crosses answers off the card. The moment a shouted answer matches one on the list, Team A calls “yes” and marks it. The guessers should hear confirmation so they know not to repeat it.
5. Keep going until the timer sounds. Whatever is still uncrossed at the beep does not count.
6. Score the round, then swap. Team B banks its points, hands the card back or discards it, and the teams reverse roles for the next round.

The single rule that matters most: only answers printed on the card score. This is what keeps the game fast. If you start allowing near-misses you will spend the evening negotiating instead of playing. Tell your room this before the first round and you will never have to defend it again.

The anatomy of a good round

Once you have played a few rounds you will notice they all follow the same five-beat structure. Knowing it helps you pace a party, because you can tell from the noise level which beat you are in.

Scoring, bonuses and tie-breakers

A party game lives or dies on whether people trust the score. These rules are designed so that every point can be traced to something that happened, and so that the running total is interesting to watch rather than just a formality.

The base score

• 1 point per correct answer. The reading team crosses off as it hears them; the number crossed off at the beep is the score.
• +3 bonus points for a clean sweep. Name every answer on the card inside the sixty seconds and take three extra. On a seven-answer card this is genuinely hard and worth the reward.
• +2 for the last-answer dash. If the final answer is called in the last ten seconds, add two. This keeps teams shouting right to the buzzer instead of conceding at forty-five seconds, which is the single most common way a game goes flat.
• 0 for a blank card. No answers at all scores nothing. It happens rarely, and the room will not let them forget it.

Optional bonuses for a livelier table

Pick two of these at most. Stacking all of them turns a crisp game into an accounting exercise.

• Creative credit (+1). If a team gives an answer that is not on the card but that every opposing player agrees is legitimately in category, award one point. Both teams have to agree, which keeps it rare and therefore fun. This is the one rule that lets you play with categories from another country or a different generation.
• One-voice rule (+2). Award two points if the team delivers every correct answer through a single nominated spokesperson. A brutal but brilliant difficulty dial for strong players, because it forces them to self-organise under the clock.
• Silence bonus (+2). Two points to a reading team that reads the category, marks the answers, and never once repeats the category to nudge their opponents. Rewards a clean, fair read.
• Comeback bonus (+2). The team currently behind by ten or more points gets two free points at the start of each of their rounds. Keeps a lopsided party from losing interest, and nobody objects to it because the leader is still clearly ahead.

Handicaps that work

If one team is clearly stronger — say two teachers against four teenagers — apply a handicap before the game rather than after it.

Tie-breakers, in order

1. Sudden-death card. Draw one unused card. Both teams get sixty seconds on the same category, one after the other, with the first team’s answers written down so the second team cannot simply repeat them. Highest count wins.
2. Fewest repeat guesses. If the sudden-death card is also tied, the team that repeated itself least across the whole game wins.
3. Longest single answer. Still tied? The team with the longest correct answer of the game takes it. Somebody will have said “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” at some point, and it is only fair that it counts for something.

Timing, pacing and your party timeline

Blurt It Out is short by design, which means the hosting challenge is not keeping it going — it is slotting it into an evening where it lands at peak energy rather than after everybody has eaten too much.

Choose your round length for the room, not the rulebook

If your first round ends with most cards half-filled, your clock is too short. If it ends with every card cleared and the teams shrugging, it is too long. Adjust once after round one and then leave it alone — changing the clock mid-game is the fastest way to make a room feel cheated.

How many rounds is the right number?

Plan for six rounds for a two-team game, which is about twenty minutes including scoring. Two guides on either side of that:

• Never play fewer than four rounds. With fewer, the final score is decided mostly by which team drew the easier cards, and a team that loses that way will say so.
• Never play more than ten rounds in one sitting. Beyond ten, retrieval fatigue sets in, the cards start repeating themes in people’s minds, and the noise stops being laughter and starts being shouting. Break, eat something, then come back to it later in the evening.

A two-hour party timeline that works

Here is how the game sits inside a real Christmas gathering, if you want it to carry an evening rather than fill a gap.

Pace-keeping tricks that actually work

• Appoint a host who is not playing. One person who reads, times and rules on disputes removes almost all friction. If everyone is playing, the host role should rotate with the reading role.
• Announce the score out loud every round. “That’s eleven to nine, Team A still ahead.” Ten seconds of commentary buys you a room that stays invested.
• Keep the used cards visible. A growing pile of spent cards tells the room the game is progressing and stops people asking how many rounds are left.
• End on a win, not on exhaustion. Stop when the room is still laughing. If you play until it fizzles, nobody will suggest it next year.
• Have the next thing ready. If you plan to run a second game afterwards, decide which one before you start the first, so you move straight into it instead of losing five minutes to discussion.

Printable cards, score pad and how to design your own set

You can play the whole game straight from a phone screen, and many people do. But a printed set changes the feel of the evening: it can be dealt, shuffled, drawn face-down and passed around, and it survives being dropped in the gravy. A set made properly in December will come out again every year.

Card dimensions and layout

Use A6 landscape — that is a quarter of an A4 sheet, roughly 148 × 105 mm. It is big enough for seven answers in readable type and small enough to hold in one hand while the other hand holds a pencil. Plain card stock of about 200–250 gsm is ideal; regular printer paper works but will show the answer list through the back, which lets a sharp-eyed opponent read ahead.

On each card, lay it out like this:

• Top third: the category name, in caps, large. This is the only thing the reader says aloud.
• Middle: the answer list, numbered 1 to 7, one per line, with enough white space that a pencil tick is obvious.
• Bottom strip: a small tier label — Easy, Medium or Hard — so you can control difficulty without reading the answers.
• Bottom right corner: a card number. This is what lets you check a disputed card later instead of arguing from memory.

Colour coding by difficulty

Print the three tiers on three different colours of card. This is the single most useful thing you can do with a homemade set, because it lets you pull an Easy card for a round with the children and a Hard card for the adults-only game without reading anything.

• Easy — green. Named objects and foods. Card bank A below.
• Medium — gold. Requires a little memory or word association. Card bank B below.
• Hard — red. Constrained lists, scoring by quality of recall. Card bank C below.

Making the set last

• Laminate the cards. Cheap laminating pouches turn a single-Christmas set into a ten-year one, and let you wipe off pencil ticks with a cloth.
• Use pencil, not pen. Pencil rubs out; pen means the card is used once.
• Store by tier, not by number. Three elastic bands, three difficulty tiers. It makes choosing a card at the table instant.
• Keep a blank card in each tier. Guests will invent categories, and some of them will be good enough to keep. Write down the best ones each year.
• Number every card. When two people disagree about whether an answer was on the card, the number settles it in seconds.

Writing your own categories

The category banks that follow contain 40 cards and more than 280 answers, which is far more than most groups will get through in one December. If you do want to write your own, four rules keep cards playable:

1. Seven answers, no more, no fewer. Six is too easy to sweep; eight drags and the last two answers are almost never reached.
2. Every answer must be gettable by somebody in the room in ten seconds. If you would need to think about it, it does not belong on a card.
3. No overlap with another card. Two cards that both heavily feature Santa will make the second one feel like a repeat.
4. Keep the funny one in. Every card should have one answer that makes people laugh when it finally lands. That answer is usually the last one crossed off.

Category bank A: 14 easy cards

Green tier. Named objects, foods and characters that every player in the room can picture. These are the cards to use for round one, for younger players and for warming up a room where half the guests have never played. Seven answers each.

Category bank B: 14 medium cards

Gold tier. The answers are still common knowledge, but they need a small step of recall or word association rather than simple naming. This tier is where most adult groups land after round two, and where the best laughs happen — the answers are reachable, just not immediately.

Category bank C: 12 hard cards

Red tier. These cards constrain the answer in a way that makes recall genuinely difficult — a letter, a rhyme, a word shape. Use these for the final rounds of a competitive adult game, or as a late-evening tie-breaker. Expect scores to drop, and expect the room to get much louder.

Two extra sets for specific rooms

These are drawn from the same tiers but grouped so you can pull one set for a room of children and a different one once the children are in bed. Nothing here needs printing — read the list straight from the page.

Two teams, four teams and very big rooms

Every group is a different size, and a game that only works for eight people is a game you cannot plan a party around. Below are six formats, arranged from smallest to largest. Pick the one that matches your room and adjust nothing else.

Format 1: two teams (4–12 players)

The default. Two teams, alternate rounds, one reader per round. Everything in this article works exactly as written. This is the format to choose if you have any doubt at all, because it is the one people already understand.

Format 2: three teams with a rotating reader (6–18 players)

Three teams, and each round the reading duty moves to the next team in the circle. Team A reads for Team B, Team B reads for Team C, Team C reads for Team A. The advantage is that with three teams somebody is always resting, which means the noise stays loud for longer and people can get up for a drink without stalling the game.

The one change to scoring: with three teams, a spread of scores is less motivating than a race, so announce the leaderboard after every round. It matters more here than in a two-team game.

Format 3: four-plus teams tournament (16–40 players)

Four or more teams, split across two tables or two corners of a room, playing in parallel. This is the format that turns the game into a party centrepiece rather than a table game.

1. Split the room into four teams of roughly equal strength.
2. Pair them up: Team 1 plays against Team 2, and Team 3 plays against Team 4, in different parts of the room.
3. Run two rounds in parallel. Each pair keeps its own score.
4. Swap opponents: the winners of each pair now play each other for the final, and the two losing teams play a consolation round.
5. Champion is the team that wins the winners’ final. Announce it loudly — with parallel tables, half the room will have missed it otherwise.

Format 4: large hall game (30–60+ players)

For a community hall, a works party, a big family reunion or a school event. The mechanic is identical; the logistics change.

• Use a microphone. A reader without amplification cannot be heard beyond about twenty people, and a category nobody can hear is a dead round.
• Project the category. If you have a screen, put the category name on it in large type. This removes the hearing problem entirely and lets the hall read along.
• Extend the clock to two minutes. Answers have to physically travel across a room. Sixty seconds is not enough when a team is shouting from opposite ends of a hall.
• Nominate one scorekeeper per team. Do not rely on group marking at scale — designate one person per side with the card and a pencil.
• Play in a horseshoe, not rows. If you can push tables to the sides and seat the teams in a U shape, every team can see and hear the host.
• Appoint a runner. One non-playing person who carries cards between the host and the teams saves minutes per round, which at scale is the difference between six rounds and three.

Format 5: the living-room format (2–4 players)

Sometimes it is just two of you, or you and the children. Do not try to run teams — play head-to-head instead.

1. One player reads, the other guesses, for sixty seconds.
2. Swap immediately. Both players get the same card, so the difficulty is exactly equal.
3. Turn about for as many cards as you fancy. Highest total wins.

With two players, the reading role is also the scoring role, so agree before you start that the reader marks honestly and generously — near-misses that are clearly intended should get the tick, because there is no second opponent to keep them in check. It is a two-player game; allowing the near-miss makes it a friendlier one.

Format 6: classroom and youth-group format (any size)

Schools, scouts, youth groups and after-school clubs can run this with one adjustment: the adult or leader reads and scores, and never plays. Children divided into four or five teams, one leader at the front with the cards, and the clock visible on a screen or board. Use the children’s set for the six-to-ten age bracket, and bank A for anything younger.

For very young groups, cut the answers per card from seven to five before you start and extend the clock to ninety seconds. A card that only half the room can finish is a card that has done its job.

Kid, family, teen and adults-only versions

This is the section that decides whether the game lands. The mechanic does not change across age groups — the tier of card, the clock length and the scoring bonuses change. Get those three dials right and the same game works from a six-year-old’s birthday table to a grown-up Boxing Day party of eighteen people.

The kid-friendly version (ages 6–10)

• Tier: bank A only, plus the children’s set.
• Clock: 90 seconds.
• Bonuses: keep the clean-sweep bonus, drop everything else. Bonuses add up faster than children can follow.
• Reading: an adult or an older sibling reads.
• Teams: mix adults and children rather than children against adults. Teaming each child with one grown-up guarantees every child gets to shout and be heard.
• Rule change: allow “close enough” answers. If a child says “sprouts” and the card says “Brussels sprouts”, tick it. At this age the game is about being loud and being right, not about exact phrasing.

The family version (mixed ages, 6–80)

The version most households will actually play on Christmas Day. The trick is that each team must contain one child and one adult. That single constraint fixes almost every age problem in a party game: no team is dragged down by its youngest member, and no child is left sitting watching adults answer everything.

• Tier: start with bank A for round one, move to bank B once the room is warm, and let any team choose to say “we are taking a gold card” for a bonus point.
• Clock: 60 seconds, extended to 90 for any round that includes a player under eight.
• Bonuses: clean sweep and last-answer dash only.
• The one essential house rule: an adult may not answer for a child, and a child may not answer for an adult. Everybody shouts for themselves.

The teen version (ages 13–17)

Teenagers are usually the strongest players at the table, because their recall is fast and they are fearless about shouting. Two adjustments keep the game interesting for a room of them.

• Tier: banks B and C, with an extra rule on C cards — no answer may be said twice by the same team across the whole game. Once “gangster” has been used for a rhyme card, it is spent.
• Clock: 45 seconds.
• Add the one-voice rule (+2): all answers must come through a nominated spokesperson. This is the single best rule for a room of teenagers, because it forces them to organise instead of yelling over each other — and the moment they get it wrong is hilarious.
• Add phone-free scoring: the reading team keeps score by hand. A phone on the table becomes a search engine within ninety seconds otherwise.

The adults-only version (14+ or 18+)

The same game with three dials turned up. This is the version to run after the children have gone up and the room has settled into the second half of the evening.

• Tier: bank C only, plus the adults-only set.
• Clock: 30 seconds. At this speed the game becomes almost entirely about retrieval speed, and the room will get very loud very quickly.
• Bonuses: creative credit (+1, by unanimous agreement of the opposing team) and the one-voice rule (+2).
• Handicap: stronger players shoot at 20 seconds.

The adults-only party variant

This is the drinking-game version, and it needs to be handled carefully because it is easy to make it unpleasant. Keep it to a single rule, and keep it mild:

• Wrong answer, small sip. Not a shot, not a penalty drink — a sip. A wrong guess costs you a sip, and that is the entire house rule.
• Nobody is obliged. Water, soft drinks and no drink at all are all valid — the rule applies to whatever is in your glass. Say this out loud before the first round; it is what makes the variant welcoming rather than pressuring.
• No penalties for not answering. Only wrong guesses cost a sip. Silence is always free. This stops the rule from punishing the shyest person in the room, who is also usually the person most likely to be a good player once they relax.
• Cap it at three rounds. Enough to be funny, not enough for the game to degrade into people mishearing the category.
• Skip the variant entirely if there is anyone at the table who is driving, pregnant, on medication or simply not drinking. There is no version of this rule that is worth making a guest feel singled out.

Which version for which room

Hosting tips, prizes and troubleshooting

The rules are simple; hosting a room of shouting relatives is not. Here is what actually goes wrong, what to do about it, and how to set up a table so the game runs itself.

Setting up the room

• Seat teams facing each other. Teams sitting side by side end up whispering to each other, which kills the game. Facing each other keeps everyone shouting outward at the opponents.
• Put the reader in the middle of their own team. The reader needs to hear every opponent’s shout clearly to mark the card, and the middle of your own row is the best acoustic seat in the room.
• Remove phones from the table. Announce it as a house rule at the start rather than policing it later. A phone is a search engine the second somebody gets stuck.
• Have water on the table. Sixty seconds of shouting is surprisingly drying. Nobody thinks of this until round three.
• Clear the clutter. Plates, glasses and cracker debris are what knock cards on the floor. Push them to a side table before the first round.
• Turn the music down. If there is a Christmas playlist on, drop it for game time. Music is the single most common reason a team cannot hear a category.

Prizes that work, by budget

A prize is not required — bragging rights carry this game further than most — but a small prize sharpens play noticeably. The best prizes are consumable, shareable and slightly silly. Resist anything expensive; a disproportionate prize makes the losing team feel worse and the game less fun.

Troubleshooting: the six things that reliably go wrong

Frequently asked questions

The questions people actually ask before playing this for the first time.

Play it tonight

You now have everything: the rules in ninety seconds of reading, forty cards with more than 280 answers, a scoring system that settles its own arguments, six formats from two players to a full hall, and versions calibrated for every age at your table.

The only thing left is the part that actually matters, and it takes ten seconds. Say the category out loud. Start the clock. Let the room get loud.

If you only have five minutes before guests arrive

1. Print the print-and-play grid — that is four full cards, enough for a short game.
2. Draw the score pad on the back of an envelope. Four columns, six rows.
3. Set a phone timer to 60 seconds and test that you can hear it from across the room.
4. Decide your round count now. Six rounds, then announce the winner.
5. Read the round steps aloud once to whoever is standing nearest. That is the whole briefing.

Then put the page down, pick up the cards, and let somebody shout “BRUSSELS SPROUTS” at a grandparent. That is the game, and it works every single year.

How this guide was put together

The rules, timings and scoring in this article were written from scratch and tested against the way the game is actually played at a family table rather than in a tournament setting. The category banks were built to a fixed structure — seven answers per card, three difficulty tiers, no thematic overlap between cards — so that any card you draw is playable inside sixty seconds by a mixed-age group. The clock recommendations, handicap options and hosting fixes are drawn from the practical problems that come up repeatedly with group guessing games: one player dominating, a team falling too far behind to care, a category nobody can hear, and the argument about whether time was really up.

Where a rule could not be settled cleanly, the guide deliberately chooses the version that produces less friction at the table, and says so where it does. Every recommendation here can be varied to suit your room — the structure is what matters, not the exact numbers.