Game on: hands down

So you’re underway with word games. What next? Time for a bit of hand-slapping. By which I mean games that involve hands to play the game – with the potential for a bit more overtly competitive behaviour, if you want.

1) The classic is Hand Sandwich. One person puts one hand on a flat surface: the table on a train, your knee, whatever is to hand. The next person puts one hand on top.  If you’ve got more than one person, they go next.

When you’ve got everyone involved, you all then put the other hand on top, in the same order as for the first hand. Once all those hands are stacked up, then you really get going.

The first person slides their hand out from the bottom, and puts it on top.  Then the next person. Then the next. And so on.

All this sounds a bit tame – so let’s just say that the fun is to go as fast as you can. The game ends at some point when all the hands are going faster than you can stack them (which can mean a bit of light hand slapping, if you choose).

2) Hand Sandwich: Going Up in the World

This is a variant we’ve come up with while on trains around London. You build up the stack, but allow your hand to move up at each new addition, so that the hands go up into the air.

Then you rebuild downwards ie reposition your hand directly below the lowest one.  It’s surprisingly hard to do – but quite fun as a shift part way through, if you sense your small companion is getting bored. (It also allows for a certain level of collapse onto the chosen surface, which can be fun if you’ve had enough.)

3) Hand Sandwich: Add the Filling

This is quite a new one, but allows for hands + words. You do the same as in the first version, but each time you verbally add a new ‘ingredient’.

Usually the first person starts with ‘bread’ (or whatever you want your ingredients to go int0) e.g.

Bread…

Ham…

Cheese…

Ketchup…

Fried egg…

Custard…

And so on. This is fun for food awareness – as well as grossing your opponents out. You can try to preempt an end to the game (‘bread’ for the top layer), or you can allow for multiple carb layers, and make it a club sandwich.

Younger players may choose to pretend to eat the stack of hands – or wipe pretend ketchup on their opponents – or however you choose to end.

I’m sure you could probably come up with some other versions of your layers.
Any suggestions?