New Year's Party Game Ideas for Kids

New Year's can be a great time to get together with all your friends and have a grand ol' party. Fireworks, the ball dropping, and plently of alcohol certainly make it an enjoyable time of year. However, it can get rather weary when you have kids hanging around perpetually asking when you can go home or complaining that they're bored. To really keep them busy here are a few games you can give them to play that are guaranteed to keep them occupied for hours.

Fruit Basket Turn-Over
For this game you will need to divide the kids into three or four groups depending on how many kids there are. The groups are "Apples", "Oranges", "Grapes", and "Cherries". You can choose to omit one if there are not enough kids to make it fun. Designate one kid as "The Master" or any other name you so desire. Have all the other children take seats in a circle around "The Master". This way there is one less seat than there are children. The Master will call out one of the group's names and then everyone in that group has to get up and change seats and they cannot take the seat directly next to them and they cannot return to their seat. The goal is for the person in the middle to obtain a seat in the middle of all this seat changing. When The Master wants everybody to switch they will say "Fruit Basket Turn-Over." This game will keep them busy for hours.

Balloon Burst
This game requires a little preparation, but not much. You'll need to write down some funny things to do an pieces of paper. Some examples would be: read from the telephone as a Shakespearian actor or sing Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog as Elvis. Put these pieces of paper into balloons and then blow them up. The kids sit in a circle and pass around the balloon and sit on it when it comes to them. Whoever pops the balloon has to do what the piece of paper inside says. Get creative!

Bumpety Bump
The kids sit in a circle with one person standing in the middle. The person in the middle points to a person in the circle and says "Right (or left) bumptety, bump, bump, bump!" The person being pointed at has to say the name of the person on their left or right (whichever is called for) before the person in the middle finishes saying the phrase. If they don't say the persons name before the middle-man finishes the phrase, they become the middle-man. This game gets pretty crazy once the kids figure out that if they move quickly enough they can catch someone off guard.

Longest Chain
For this game you will need to separate the kids into groups. Depending on the number of kids it can be two, three, four, or even more groups. The basic goal is to make the longest chain using only their bodies. Every child has to be standing and they have to be touching. You can make it more fun and inventive by saying they can use belts, scarves, or scrunchies as well.

Spoons
For this game you will need a deck of cards and some spoons. The group limit on this one is thirteen unless you have more than one deck of cards. You will need one less spoon than there are players. The goal of this game is to acquire four cards of the same denomination. So, four three's, four kings, four queens etc. The cards are shuffled and the dealer deals four cards to everyone. The dealer then picks cards one by one from the remaining stack. If a card that he picks fits with the denomination he is trying to collect he keeps it and discards an unwanted card and passes that card to the next person in line. The next person in line does the same, deciding if they want to keep the card or pass it on to the next person. You can only have four cards at a time so anytime you keep a card you have to pass one on. The first person to get four cards of the same denomination takes a spoon. As others notice that a spoon is missing they too take a spoon regardless of whether or not they have completed their collecting. The game ends when there are no more spoons left and one person is left without a spoon. You can play it where the loser of each game sits out until an ultimate champion is declared or where each round starts a new. This game can get very noisy as people grasp and struggle for the last spoon.