The best 14 Nerf party games

The five best Nerf party games

These five were the consistent crowd favorites — asked for twice or more, every time. They also hold up across the widest spread of ages and the most uneven pile of blasters you will get handed.

• Capture the Flag · teams · 10–15 min

  The one nobody has to be taught. Two flags, two bases, steal theirs and get it home. What makes it carry a wide age range is the medic rule: when you are hit you drop your blaster and take a knee, and any teammate can tag you back in. The six-year-old is never standing on the grass watching.

• Meat Grinder · teams or free-for-all · 10–15 min

  No score, no bases, no plan. Get hit, go back to the spawn point, rejoin immediately. It got asked for again because there is no thinking in it, which is exactly what they want at the point in the party where everybody is shouting.

• Humans vs. Zombies · teams · 10–15 min

  Humans have blasters, zombies have hands and tag by touch. A tagged human turns. Patient Zero has unlimited lives until they infect somebody; the zombies get three. Nobody is ever out, they change sides — and this is the one the quiet kid comes back to.

• President · teams · 5–10 min

  One defender is the President: single-shot blaster, one life. Bodyguards can take hits for them, attackers respawn forever but must come back from as far away as possible. It is the best round on this page for making one particular child the center of the party, because being President is a job. Guests spot a handicap inside two minutes and will say so.

• Golden · free-for-all · 5 min

  A backyard remix of the Golden Gun mode from GoldenEye on the N64, and it is the best five minutes on this page. One dart, one life, no reloads, though you may pick darts up off the ground. A yard full of loud children goes completely silent. Run it last.

The mechanics that make a game

The rest of the list looks like a lot of different games. It is closer to five switches, and once you can see them you pick a round by what you want to change rather than by which name sounds good.

It also tells you which two rounds not to run back to back. Two respawn team games in a row is the same round twice with the flags moved, and they will notice before you do.

• Teams or free-for-all

  Teams if the ages are mixed, the blasters are uneven, or you did not draw the guest list. Free-for-all wants a tight age band and matched kit.

• Respawn or lives

  Respawn means nobody sits out and the round ends when the clock does. Lives mean it ends on a result and somebody waits. Both are good; only one of them is good with an hour still to fill.

• Tag or blaster

  Zombies tag by hand, hunters tag by hand, everybody else shoots. A hand-tag round is what you reach for when three guests turned up without a blaster.

• How many darts

  Unlimited is chaos, three is tension, one is silence. Ammo is the cheapest dial you have and the one hosts never think to touch.

• Whether somebody is the target

  A President, a Juggernaut, a crown. Name one player and the round organizes itself around them without you having to organize anything.

Some other fun Nerf party games to try

These were fun too. Whether one landed came down to the group and how much energy was left in it, which is worth knowing before you commit to a running order.

• No Man's Land · teams · 5–10 min

  The field is split and nobody crosses. Infinite lives, ten-second respawn — but you come back on the other team, so the sides rebalance themselves and it ends when everybody is on one. Stragglers at the back get shot.

• Freeze Royale · teams · 5–10 min

  Freeze tag with blasters. Hit and you stop moving — no reloading, no shuffling — until a teammate tags or shoots you free. If you are touching another player when you are hit, they freeze too. Call it the conga-line rule and they will find it on purpose.

• Pirate's Alliance · teams · 10–15 min

  Everybody starts as their own pirate. Get hit and five seconds later you are on that pirate's crew. Sides swell and collapse all round. Biggest crew wins; smallest picks the next game.

• Castle Defense · teams · 5–15 min

  A fort each and a line nobody crosses. Land darts in the other team's net. Infinite lives with a ten-second respawn from behind your base, twenty if you crossed the line. You cannot reuse darts that land in your own fort.

• Central Intelligence · teams · 5–15 min

  A football in the middle is the intelligence. Carry it back to your base for a point, then it resets. Infinite lives, ten-second respawn — and whoever is holding it must walk, which is what stops it becoming a footrace.

• Juggernaut · teams · 5–15 min

  One or two Juggernauts hold the biggest blasters and cannot leave their base: three lives, no reloads, so every shot has to count. Everybody else is on single-shot with unlimited respawns. Swap the Juggernauts every round or the same child holds the big blaster all party.

• Capture the Crown · free-for-all · 1–10 min

  Wear the crown when the clock stops. Shoot whoever has it and it is yours, plus five seconds of invulnerability. Anyone the crown-holder hits is stunned for fifteen. Terrifying to hold, which is the fun.

• Hunter · free-for-all · 10–15 min

  One armed hunter, everybody else unarmed and avoiding them. Tagged players become hunters. Longest survivor wins, and the first person tagged starts the next round as the hunter.

• 3:15 Showdown · teams · 5–10 min

  Three lives each, fifteen-second respawn, and you have to get back to base before the timer starts. When it comes down to one against one it ends in a duel: five paces, turn, shoot. Nobody runs away.

How to run Nerf party games well

The games are not the hard part. Explaining the rules outside, in a yard, to a bunch of kids already holding blasters — that is the hard part, and it is where mine went wrong long before anything in the games did.

Pick the length first if you have not — how long the party runs is the number the rest of this comes out of. Work backward from it to how many rounds you need and where the loud ones go, so the group is not spent by round three.

• Change one thing a round

  Say only what changed. Same respawn count all party, same out of bounds, same what counts as a hit. If respawn is ten seconds in round two it is ten seconds in round five, and by the third round the group enforces it on each other instead of asking you.

• Rules and safety first

  Two of them, before anybody loads: eye protection stays on for the whole party, and nobody aims at a head. Said once, said the same way, never changed. The second one is why a nervous child will play at all.

• Settle disputed hits in advance

  One round of rock paper scissors, and a tie means you are out. Four seconds, and it removes the single most common way a round dies.

• Call the round on the clock

  Half of these end on the clock by design. End the other half early too — a round that drags while nine kids wait for the last two is worse than one that finished without a winner.

• Tip the scales

  Balancing the teams is the hardest thing you do all party, and even is not the target. Never let them pick. Split the two loudest, put the youngest on flag defense — the job that keeps somebody near their own base and out of the sprinting — and if a side is still losing badly at halfway, hand them a player rather than a new rule.

Where to find more Nerf party games

Here are some helpful resources if you want more than the fourteen above.

• r/Nerf

  Search a game name and you get the argument about the rule that does not work. That is the half nobody writes into a guide. reddit.com/r/Nerf

• Defcon Airsoft's game modes guide

  The most useful page on this list. Thirteen modes, and you will recognize most of them with foam swapped in — VIP Protection is President, Freeze Tag is Freeze Royale, King of the Hill is Capture the Crown. defconairsoft.co.uk

• Gator HvZ's rulebook

  A university club's full ruleset: tagging, stun timers, safe zones, what happens to a zombie who takes a dart. Written for a campus game running for days, so take the mechanics and ignore the scale. gatorhvz.com

• NerfHaven

  Its Game Types and Rules for Nerf Wars thread is still the most complete list anybody sat down and wrote. No link, because the site has been up and down for a while — if it will not load, the Wayback Machine has it.

Put the games on your TV

Choosing the game was never the hard part. Getting a bunch of kids to remember the rules — and then doing it again eleven minutes later with a different set — is the hard part. That is what this got built for.

Agents of Mischief is the five best — Capture the Flag, Meat Grinder, Humans vs. Zombies, President and Golden — sequenced and cast to the TV you already own. The briefing goes up on screen where the whole group reads it at once, with music under it and a countdown already running, and the result lands at the end. Same rules, same words, every round. Nobody is asking you what respawn is.

A TV and your phone is the whole setup. Your phone is the remote, nothing installs on any guest's phone, and no child looks at the screen for longer than it takes to find out what happens next.

You still pick the round, still call stop, still decide when to switch. Of course you could run every one of these off a printed sheet. We just 1Up'd the explaining.

The rules, where everybody can see them

Every switch means a new set of rules, and nobody remembers the last set. On the wall they get read rather than shouted, and the kid who missed it can look again without asking you.