Games - Circle Games - Sofa Game

The Sofa Game

This is a game that can be played by older children in a large living room. You need two teams - boys verses girls works well if the numbers are evenly matched. You need a large sofa or four specially designated seats next to each other. Every one sits around the room in a rough circle each in their own place - you also leave an empty place where someone could sit. The players can sit randomly except for on the four designated sits where two people from each team sit alternately. (i.e. boy, girl, boy, girl). Each player writes their name on a piece of paper, folds it up and the names are all mixed up and distributed randomly - one to each player.The game can now start - the player with the space to their right calls out a name of one of the people in the room. The person with that name on the piece of paper they have been given moves to sit in the space and swaps pieces of paper, and hence the names they move in response to, with the person that called them. This leaves another space which the called person has just vacated. The person to the right of this new space then calls a name of someone in the room who moves to the space and swaps pieces of paper. This continues until the game is one. The objective of the game is to fill all four places on the sofa of designated seats completely with members of your team.The fun comes from remembering who has what name as the continual swapping makes it quite hard to keep track along with the strategy of calling people to let the space be called by members of your team.