During family gatherings we often want to play something silly that allows us to sit around and have a fun time but without getting up to a table and using a board or cards that we all need to reach. This has become especially important since COVID as my wife’s Long Covid fatigue means that sitting up at a table just doesn’t happen much!
So I’m looking for chill party games. We play Herd Mentality, Green Team Wins, Bring Your Own Book and sometimes Snake Oil. All have given rise to classic tales of family lore (e.g. when playing Herd Mentality with the question of which body part could you do without, my sister in law said Chin (a bit funny in itself but it was her absolute certainty that we’d all have put chin that made it so funny. We have never let the chinless wonder forget it) and I’m looking for similar games that could bring a bit of variety
(We do also play Just One and, if a smaller gathering where you can at least see a central space, SO Clover).
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I have questions about these games you mentioned that I haven’t played 
Now I need to do some research.
Concept. You have a central board but you could also just announce where you placed the cubes that define the concept. We’ve had some legendary moments… where my placing a cube on red prompted my partner to yell “Ferrari” which was correct of course.
Hitster. Haven’t really played it. But our one play suggested that you could play it with very little table space if you play as a single team.
Ito or Top Ten. Have not tried the former. But Top Ten seems very similar and that one has produced some running gags that are not going away anytime soon. Needs no table space. We have played it in a tent, on a train… whenever. Ito is probably the more “classy” variant.
That’s Not a Hat? Depends a bit on how much brain fog your wife is dealing with
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Good shout. And you can do this with pen and paper so don’t even have to buy the game!
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Gartik phone
It’s Telestrations but you make your own prompts and have to draw on your screen.
My kids have been playing Jackbox on the Switch recently and there’s been a lot of laughter coming from the lounge
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When we have a group sitting around, and people kinda want to do something other than just talk but don’t want to move from where they are, Contact is often the solution.
No equipment required! Someone (I’ll call them the thinker) thinks of a word and tells everyone the first letter (say, F). Then the other players will take a guess at the word by defining it: “Is it a camera option?”
Then another one of the players says “Contact”, the two of them will lock eyes and count down 3, 2, 1, then say the word they’re both thinking of (flash). If they match, the thinker gives the next letter of their word (“F O”), and now all the guesses need to start with FO, and so on until they get the last letter or happen to guess the word itself.
The thinker’s job is to intercept; in the example above, as soon as they realized what the player meant, they’d say “It’s not flash.” That would spoil the players’ attempt and they’d have to clue another F word. So the players want to come up with clues that another player, but not the thinker, will understand.
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