Festive mini games - Day 1 "Coin Tales"

This year I am sharing 24 mini games, where the rules can be explained on the back of a single business card. For the 24 days of advent I will be sharing one a day on my blog. Today's game is called "Coin Tales". 


I love little games, that take moments to explain and fill between 2-15 minutes. So, I set myself a challenge to collect and create as many as possible. I have had them printed on business cards with a festive Gold emboss and I am slipping them into all my Christmas cards this year. 

Day 1 "Coin Tales"

Players: 2-12 players
Equipment: 1 coin per player

Concise rules: 
Everyone grabs a random coin, check the year it was minted. You need to think of a short story from your life that happened that year. Flip the coin to decide if  your story is true (heads) or a lie (tails). Everyone tells their story and players guess if it is true or a lie. 

Alternatively, the stories can be general knowledge and you can use your phone for research. 

Notes:
Many of the games are imagined to be played around a dinner table, maybe after a meal or between course. So they are equipment light or require no equipment at all (although I'm not sure many people carry coins). In the tradition of ice breakers a few of these games are also designed to help people get to know each other. This game is an adaption of the classic 2 truths and 1 lie style game. The base game assumes all coins used were minted during the lifetime of players, if playing with younger folk you might need to check the coins are not all from before they were born. The general knowledge variation is another way to deal with this possibility. 

The jpg below shows the print file used, the print company requires the sections to be embossed in gold to be pure black. 



Game extension/variation: 
It would take a bit of prep work but if you can collect a random collection of coins from a variety of countries you could give the players the challenge to tell a story related to the country the coin is from. If you want to make it more complicated, the story teller can not say the name of the country and the players have to try and guess the country and decide if the story is true or false. Again this can be done with either the life story or general knowledge variation. And for the super keen history buff groups. You could make it extra difficult by asking them to share a story from the year and country of the coin combined. 




Bit of admin: 
Some of the games I am sharing are classic parlor games (look for the top hat symbol), some are original creations by me (with the fish symbol) and a couple are hacks of games using commonly board games (the cog symbol). It was a bit of guess work on some of the games, I may have called a game an original creation because I can't remember reading it anywhere but I might have played it at a party or youth group a couple of decades ago. If you know a source for a game I have shared as an original please let me know. 

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