How to Play Yankee Swap

I wrote about my Yankee Swap prize yesterday and a bunch of people wrote to me to ask what that was. Yankee Swap is a game you play with a super cool group of friends and family. Here are the rules:

1. Everybody brings a wrapped gift. The less obvious what the present is (don’t wrap mugs in a mug shaped wrapper), the better. Gifts can be things you want or slightly more of a joke. Set a price range for the group.
2. Draw numbers out of a hat. The person with #1 goes first, #2 second and so on.
3. The first person picks a gift from the pile and unwraps it.
4. The second person can choose to steal the first gift or unwrap a new one from the pile.
5. The third person can choose to steal any opened gift or unwrap a new one from the pile
6. If your gift got stolen, you can steal someone else’s, or unwrap a new one from the pile.
7. A gift cannot be stolen twice out of the same round (ie. person #5’s round), but if you get your gift stolen you can steal it again in another round.
8. The game keeps going until all the gifts have been unwrapped.

If you have a group of cool friends, this is so much more fun than Secret Santa!