How to Play Yankee Swap (White Elephant Gift Exchange)

When you host a party, it can sometimes be difficult to entertain large numbers of guests and encourage them to interact. Yankee swaps or white elephant gift exchanges are a great way to bring people together with little or no money involved. In this article, I will explain basic rules of the game and some variations you may like to try.

The rules of a Yankee swap are very simple, but first you need to do a little preparation work:

1) First, you need to let your guests know limitations to the gifts they bring.

Each person only has to bring one gift and will receive one gift by the end. There can also be limits in the form of a maximum dollar amount or a theme. Most Yankee swaps I've attended were usually $10 and under, but you can fit it to any budget. The main thing is you don't want anyone to overspend and feel bad about it later that they didn't know.

2) As far as choosing themes, they can vary widely. At one of the nicer ones I've attended, everyone brought Christmas ornaments ranging from $7-10.

The cheapest one had a limitation that you couldn't spend any money. One of the gifts was a half-used roll of toilet paper. Guests are generally more creative when you ask them to think of an off-the-wall gift that people may want to "fight" over and give them enough advanced notice to find something. You can also base gifts on your particular organization-a book club exchanging books as an easy example.

Just as a general rule, keep in mind your focus should be on the entertainment value and not the cost of the gift.

3) When you gather everyone together, the easiest thing to do is draw numbers to pick who goes first through last.

You should also establish rules upfront on how many times a gift can be "taken" in a round (basically a new person's turn)-if you don't, there's a tendency for a cycle to occur between 2-3 of the most stubborn people in the room. They might have a lot of fun, but your other guests will consider this game a form of torture after the first 15 minutes.

4) The person who drew the number "1" picks the first gift.

At this point, they can't do anything else. Person 2 has the choice of taking Person 1's gift or selecting an unopened one. If person 1's gift is taken, they get to open another one.

Person 3 can take either of the opened gifts or select a new one. At this point there are enough gifts in play that a person who has their gift taken has the choice between opened and unopened gifts (other than the gift that was taken from them). This is why you may have to establish a limit on how many times a particular gift can be "taken" in one round.

Continue this process until you reach the last person and all the gifts are opened. According to your choice, the 1st person has either the best or worst position in the game. If you want them to have the best, give them the option of either keeping their current gift or trading one last time with all the gifts known. The other option is to have the exchange end with the person with the last number.