Halloween Party Games for Adults: tarot, talking boards and the old fortune games

If you have people round on the 31st and you're wondering what to actually do with them, there's an old answer. Telling fortunes for a laugh is the original Halloween party game, and it still beats another round of charades.

There are two sorts of game below. The old ones need nothing but a fruit bowl. The newer ones need a deck of cards, a pendulum, a bag of runes or a board, and none of them needs experience. Or belief.

Experience needed

None. The little white book does the work

Kit needed

Anything from a fruit bowl to one deck or pendulum

How old is it

On record here since the early 1700s

The one rule

Nobody gets pressed into anything

Everything here is tradition and entertainment. Nobody, including us, can promise that a card or a swinging crystal knows what next year holds. They do get a room full of people talking to each other, though.

Fortune games are the oldest Halloween party there is

Tarot on Halloween gets treated as a new-age import. But sitting round the fire on the 31st of October trying to find out who you'll marry is about as traditional as British and Irish custom gets.

The festival behind the night is older still, and our guide to what Samhain actually is and how it became Halloween tells that story. It was the hinge of the year, when the future was thought a little easier to see. So people looked.

The best record of how they went about it is Robert Burns. He wrote his poem "Halloween" in 1785 and added his own footnotes explaining each custom, which read like the rules sheet for a party.

His Ayrshire farm folk go out with eyes shut to pull kale stalks. Straight or crooked tells the shape of your future husband or wife, and earth on the root means money. They burn nuts in pairs, eat an apple at a mirror by candlelight hoping for a face over the shoulder, and dip a hand, blindfolded, into one of three dishes.

The games themselves were in print before Burns. In 1714 the English poet John Gay had a country girl throw two hazelnuts into the flame, "and to each nut I gave a sweet-heart's name", then fling an unbroken apple paring over her head to read an initial in it. Gay doesn't pin those two to a date. By Burns's day they belonged to the 31st, so firmly that parts of Scotland and the north of England called Halloween Nutcrack Night.

Across the Irish Sea it was Snap-Apple Night. The painter Daniel Maclise went to a Halloween party at Blarney in County Cork in 1832 and painted it the next year: a man lunging at an apple hung from the ceiling, boys bobbing for apples in a tub. Irish households baked a ring into the barmbrack, a wedding within the year for whoever found it, and played a blindfold game with saucers. Kevin Danaher's "The Year in Ireland" is the standard book on the Irish calendar customs.

These customs are well documented from the 1700s onwards. How much older they are, nobody can prove, and there is no written evidence that they go back to the druids. By the time anyone wrote them down they were already played for fun, with a shiver on the side. Ronald Hutton's "The Stations of the Sun" is the book if you want the evidence laid out properly.

The old games, which need no kit at all

The apple peel

Everyone peels an apple in one unbroken strip. Throw the strip over your left shoulder and the room decides what letter it's landed as. By the old rule that's the initial of the one you'll marry. People already married can ask it something else.

Bobbing, and the sensible version of snap apple

Apples in a washing-up bowl of water, hands behind backs, teeth only. For snap apple, hang the apples on strings from a doorway and the same rule applies.

The nuts

Two hazelnuts or chestnuts, named for a couple, set side by side at the edge of an open fire or on top of a stove. If they burn quietly together, all is well. If one jumps away, the room gets to discuss it.

The three bowls

Burns calls them luggies, and his version is rather pointed about marriage. The Irish saucers are kinder: a ring for a wedding, a coin for money, water for a sea crossing. Blindfold the player, shuffle the saucers, and they reach out with the left hand. Ours is a tidied-up version. The old game meant emigration by the water, and it had a saucer of clay too, which meant exactly what you think. Call the water travel and leave the clay out.

A running order for the evening

Don't start with the spookiest thing. A room needs warming up first.

1. Set the table before anyone arrives. A cloth, a few candles, the kit laid out where people can pick it up. If you want the room to smell of the season, light incense half an hour before, not during.
2. First hour: food and the daft games. Bobbing, snap apple, the apple peel.
3. Pass the pendulum round. Two minutes each, and the best ice-breaker of the lot.
4. One rune or one card each. Round the table, each person draws and reads theirs out.
5. Three card readings for those who want one. At the table, or tucked in a corner if someone would rather.
6. The board, if the room wants it. Late and optional.
7. Finish with something warm. Burns's party ends with buttered sowens and a dram. Tea and toast does the same job.

For how the house itself should look, see our guide to a Halloween you keep, without the plastic. For the table, plain candles do more than any amount of decoration.

Which game for which room

A three-card tarot spread anyone can run

Tarot began as a card game. The trumps were added to ordinary packs in fifteenth century Italy, and it was three hundred years before anyone in Paris told fortunes with them. The deck most of us picture was drawn by Pamela Colman Smith in London in 1909. So there's no ancient priesthood to offend by reading the instructions.

Nearly every deck comes with a little white book giving a few lines for each of the 78 cards. Looking it up out loud is part of the act. We sell the things, on the website and off the table at craft fairs, and we still look cards up ourselves. Nobody at your table is going to mind you doing it.

The spread

Your friend thinks of something going on in their life, out loud or not. They shuffle, and you lay three cards left to right.

Card one: where things have come from. Card two: where things stand now. Card three: something to think about next.

Turn them one at a time, read out what the book says, then ask: does that ring any bells?

The pictures give people something to hang their own thoughts on. Your job is to keep it kind. If Death or the Tower turns up, say what the book says, which is change rather than anything literal, and move along. Then ask whether it rings any bells, same as for any other card, and let them do the talking.

A traditional deck is easiest to learn on, because every guide describes the same pictures. If even that sounds like homework, use oracle cards. They have no fixed structure and usually fewer cards, and the meaning is often printed on the card itself. Fan the deck and let each person pull one and read it to the room. Both kinds are in our Tarot and Oracle collection.

Pendulum games, and how the trick works

A pendulum is a weight on a chain, usually a pointed crystal. It's the quickest thing here to learn, and the one most likely to make a sceptic say "hang on, do that again".

1. Hold it. Rest your elbow on the table, pinch the chain between thumb and forefinger with a hand's width below, and let the weight hang still.
2. Calibrate it. Say "show me yes" and wait. It'll start to move, to and fro, side to side or in a circle. Then "show me no", and it will change. Everyone's yes and no are different, so each person calibrates for themselves.
3. Test it, then play. Start with something you know the answer to. "Is my name Susan?" is the traditional level of question. Yes and no questions only, and keep them light.

Now the honest bit, which we think makes it better. You are moving it. In a letter published in 1833 the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul described his own experiments: muscle movements far too small to feel were enough to set a hand-held pendulum swinging, and they followed what he was thinking. The physiologist William Carpenter named it the ideomotor effect in 1852, and Michael Faraday found it at work in table-turning the year after.

So when it swings to yes, something in you said yes before you'd consciously decided to. Some read that as intuition finding a way out, some as a neat piece of psychology. Try holding it over a circle drawn on paper and just thinking the word "circle".

For a game, hide a coin under one of three cups and let the pendulum holder try to find it, with someone keeping score. Expect about one in three, and a lot of noise. The desk-style decision maker is less effort still. It swings over a printed board of answers and settles where it likes, which is a coin toss with better manners.

• Pendulums One of the biggest ranges we keep, in most stones you can name. Have a browse
• Raw Red Jasper Pendulum Rough stone, wire wrapped. A good weight for beginners. See this one
• Pendulum Decision Maker Swing it and let it settle. One for the coffee table. See this one

There are pendulums in dozens of stones. Have a browse and pick the one you like the look of.

One rune each

Runes are an alphabet. The oldest form, the Elder Futhark, has 24 letters and was carved in northern Europe from around the second century. Whether people then told fortunes with them is uncertain. Rune reading as practised now is mostly a twentieth century craft, and the blank 25th stone in most sets first appeared in a book in 1982. None of that makes them less fun to draw.

For a group, runes are the fastest game going. Pass the pouch round. Each person thinks of the year ahead, draws one stone without looking, looks it up, reads it out and puts it back. The meanings are broad, a journey, a gift, a harvest, a standstill, which is exactly why they work in company. People supply the detail themselves.

• Runes Sets of 25 stones in a pouch, 24 engraved and one blank, in a long list of crystals. Have a browse
• Labradorite Rune Set The stone of magic and intuition, and it catches candlelight. See this one
• Tiger Eye Rune Set Warm, stripy and hard wearing. Traditionally a stone for courage. See this one

Talking boards: the real history and some house rules

Of everything here, the talking board has the most dramatic reputation and the most ordinary origin. It was a parlour game with a patent.

• 1890 Charles Kennard and partners set up the Kennard Novelty Company in Baltimore to make a board with the alphabet printed on it. The name Ouija is said to have been spelled out by the board itself. It's still a trademark, now Hasbro's, which is why the generic thing is called a talking board.
• 1891 Elijah Bond is granted the patent on 10 February. It is sold as a game that answers questions, without saying who is answering.
• Around 1900 William Fuld, who started as an employee, takes over production and fiercely defends the trademark.
• 1966 The Fuld family sells to Parker Brothers, the Monopoly people.
• 1970s "The Exorcist" arrives, and the board's reputation changes more or less overnight.

For most of its first eighty years this was sold as something courting couples and families did after tea. Spiritualists took it seriously from early on, but the horror film reputation is a good deal younger than the board.

How the planchette moves is the pendulum question again. The scientific answer is the ideomotor effect, several people's tiny unconscious pushes adding up. Plenty of people who use boards seriously see it differently, and a good host doesn't need to pick a side.

House rules so nobody has a bad night

• Volunteers only. Nobody is talked into it, and anyone can take their fingers off and go and put the kettle on.
• Agree what's off the table. No questions about deaths, anyone's health, or the relationships of people in the room.
• No steering. If someone is caught pushing, they make the next round of drinks.
• Close it properly. Slide the planchette to GOODBYE before you pack up. It's the traditional ending, and it tells the nervous the game is over.
• Stop when it stops being fun. If anyone looks unhappy, lights up, board away, toast on.

We do sell talking boards, along with the rest of what a table like this needs.

• Black Talking Board with Planchette The classic layout: alphabet, numbers, yes, no and goodbye. See this one
• Traditional Arcana Tarot with Guide Book The familiar pictures, and the book to look them up in. See this one
• Zodiac Reading Cloth Turns the dining table into the reading table in one move. See this one
• Journals and Grimoires Write down who drew what. Next Halloween it's the best thing on the table. Have a browse

Hosting believers, sceptics and the nervous

Any group of more than four will contain all three.

The believer takes this seriously all year and may know more than you do. Ask them to run the readings, and do not let anyone make them the butt of the joke.

The sceptic is your best audience as long as nobody tries to convert them. Give them the pendulum, the Chevreul story and the score sheet.

The nervous one needs a job away from the table, like keeper of the little white book. Tell them at the start what's planned and what's optional. It's surprises that upset people, not cards.

It's surprises that upset people, not cards.

Whoever is at the table, say "the book says" and "the tradition is", never "this will happen". Nobody should change jobs because of the Eight of Cups.

There is room on the night for a candle lit for the people who are not at the table this year. That side of it is in how to mark Samhain at home.

Versions for families with children

The no kit games were family entertainment to begin with, so start there.

• Three bowls, children's edition. A sweet for a treat, a coin for pocket money, a toy car for a day out.
• One card each. A friendly oracle deck, and a story about the picture.
• Pendulum science. "Your brain is moving your hand without telling you" is a better bedtime fact than most.

We'd leave the talking board for after bedtime. Younger children can't always tell where a game stops, and you're the one who'll be up at three in the morning.

Common questions