15 Christmas Games with Solo Cups (Cheap and Easy)

If you are looking for christmas games with solo cups, you have just struck gold — and saved yourself about forty dollars in the process. Honestly, a bag of red Solo cups might be the best party investment you make all season.

No fancy kits, no batteries, no instruction booklets the size of a novel. Just cups, a few ornaments from the dollar bin, and a group of people who are about to get very competitive over plastic drinkware.

I have played every single one of these at holiday parties (some more gracefully than others, tbh), and I can promise you they work for absolutely everyone — grandparents, teens, the work crew, the cousins who claim they ‘don’t really play games.’

A quick heads-up before we dive in: if you are still scrambling to sort out the rest of your holiday plans, our 7 Ways to Budget for Christmas guide is a great place to make sure all this festive fun stays affordable.

Now, let’s get into the games!

1. Snowman Cup Stack Race

This is the classic cup-stacking race dressed up in its coziest holiday sweater.

Each player gets a matching set of white Solo cups with a hand-drawn snowman face on each one (think Sharpie eyes, a little carrot nose, a big goofy grin — takes about two minutes to draw and immediately makes everyone in the room smile).

On ‘Go!’ players race to stack all their cups into a single column as fast as humanly possible, then unstack them back into a flat pile.

First one done wins the round, and then you do it again, because no one ever wants to stop after just one round.

Set up is genuinely a two-minute job. Give everyone 10 cups, draw the snowman faces ahead of time if you want to be a gracious host, and mark a starting line with a piece of tape on the table.

You can run this as a head-to-head duel with two players going at once, or bracket-style with a whole crowd — just pair people off and let the losers cheer on the finalists.

Add a 30-second timer if you want to keep the energy frenetic and the eliminations fast.

The reason this one works so well as an opener is the noise. Cup stacking is genuinely loud and exciting, and when someone fumbles their snowman tower with three cups left to go, the room absolutely erupts.

Pro tip: run this one early in the night when guests are still arriving — it pulls shy newcomers straight into the action because the rules take about five seconds to explain and zero skill to start, even if plenty of skill to master.

2. Cup Pyramid Speed Build

This one is exactly what it sounds like — a flat-out speed competition to see who can build a full pyramid of Solo cups the fastest, then collapse it back down into a single neat stack.

The classic formation is six cups on the bottom row, then five, four, three, two, and one on top for a 21-cup pyramid.

Once the apex cup is placed and stable for a full second, the player then has to carefully work back down, nesting the cups one by one until the whole thing is a single tidy stack again.

First player to complete the full build-and-collapse cycle wins.

For the Christmas version, write one holiday word on the bottom of random cups before the game — things like ‘NAUGHTY,’ ‘NICE,’ ‘ELF,’ ‘SANTA.’

When a player’s pyramid topples (and it will topple, dramatically, at the worst moment), whichever word is on the cup that falls last is their ‘holiday fate’ for the round.

It adds a silly narrative layer that keeps the audience howling even when they are not competing. You only need 21 cups per player or team, which makes this one of the most cost-effective games on this entire list.

The magic of Cup Pyramid Speed Build is how universal the skill ceiling is. An eight-year-old and a competitive adult can both play and both feel the exact same adrenaline rush when their tower starts to wobble at the fifth row.

If you want a variation that turns this into a team event, have one person build while a partner tries to distract them with Christmas carols sung loudly and off-key directly into their ear.

Host tip: keep a spare set of cups on standby because someone will absolutely accidentally kick them across the room.

3. Flip the Cup Christmas Relay

Teams line up on opposite sides of a long table, each with a Solo cup sitting right-side-up on the edge in front of them.

On the signal, the first player in each team downs whatever is in their cup (eggnog, sparkling cider, hot cocoa — your call, I won’t judge), then uses one finger to flip the cup from the table edge, spinning it end-over-end until it lands upside-down and stays.

Once it lands, the next teammate goes. The relay continues until the last person on the team has successfully flipped their cup. First team to complete the full relay wins, and the losing team sings the first verse of a carol of the winners’ choosing.

The cup-flipping mechanic is deceptively tricky — the flip looks easy until you are standing there with the whole party watching and your cup just keeps bouncing off the table and rolling onto the floor. (I speak from deeply humbling personal experience.)

Use the lightest Solo cups you have for the best flip action; heavier cups need a stronger flick and beginner players can get stuck for embarrassingly long stretches.

Mark the table-edge spot with a strip of festive washi tape so everyone flips from the same position and there are no disputes.

This is the high-energy anchor of your party game lineup — the one that gets people shouting, cheering, and, inevitably, someone demanding a rematch.

Because it is a relay, even guests who fumble their flip eight times in a row are still part of a team, which keeps the energy supportive instead of brutal.

For a no-drink version, just fill cups one-quarter full of water — enough to require a real tilt before the flip, but not so much that it becomes a spill disaster. Either way, clear a path away from anything you love dearly.

4. Guess Under the Cup (Ornament)

The host hides a small Christmas ornament — a little shiny ball, a tiny felt star, a jingle bell — under one of three upside-down red Solo cups while the guesser watches carefully.

Then the host shuffles the cups around the table in a classic shell-game style, switching and sliding them for about 15 seconds. The guesser points to the cup they think hides the ornament. Get it right, and you earn a point.

Get it wrong, and you have to perform a holiday dare (sing a line of a carol, do a reindeer impression, etc.). Play three rounds per person and tally up the points at the end.

To set up, you need just three Solo cups and a handful of small ornaments — the pocket-sized plastic ones from the dollar section work perfectly and cost almost nothing.

If you want to make the game harder for a crowd full of sharp-eyed competitors, use five cups instead of three and have the host shuffle for a full 30 seconds while humming ‘Jingle Bells’ to add a distraction layer.

The dares written on slips of paper inside the ‘wrong’ cups make a fantastic added layer — guests almost start rooting for each other to fail just to see what the dare card says.

This game earns its place on the list because it works beautifully as an intermission game between the louder relay challenges. You only need one player at a time, which gives everyone else a chance to catch their breath and heckle cheerfully from the sidelines.

Make it a tournament bracket and you have got yourself a proper event centerpiece. The shuffling host role is the most fun position in the room, so rotate it every few rounds and let different guests take a turn being the sneaky dealer.

5. Cup Tower Knockdown Toss

Build a pyramid of red Solo cups on one end of a table — six on the bottom, then four, then two, then one — and let players take turns throwing soft projectiles from a set distance to knock as many cups off the table as possible.

Soft foam balls, ping pong balls, rolled-up socks, even mini marshmallows all work brilliantly. Each cup knocked completely off the table scores one point.

The player or team with the most points after everyone has had three throws wins, and the losing side resets the pyramid for the next round (which is, honestly, a punishment in itself).

Decorate the cups beforehand to make the knockdown even more satisfying — draw a little Grinch face on the top cup so it is worth two points to hit it first, and stick a Santa sticker on one in the middle row for a ‘lucky Santa bonus’ point.

Mark the throwing line with tape at a reasonable distance — about six feet works for adults, but scoot it closer to four feet for kids or guests who have had a few too many holiday cocktails.

The pyramid can be rebuilt in about 20 seconds, so this game loops beautifully as a filler between other structured activities.

What makes this a perennial crowd-pleaser is pure, primal satisfaction — knocking over a carefully stacked pile of cups produces a specific kind of joy that never gets old regardless of age.

If you have a lot of guests, turn it into a bracket tournament where winners face winners until one champion is crowned.

For a team variation, split into two groups, each with their own pyramid set up across the room, and see which team can fully clear their table first.

And yes, someone will eventually try to throw underhand with a spinning motion, and yes, they will miss completely, and yes, it will be hilarious.

6. Sort Ornaments into Cups

This one is part game, part scoring-sheet challenge, and 100% a crowd-pleaser for mixed-age groups.

Label a row of Solo cups with different Christmas categories — ‘Red,’ ‘Gold,’ ‘Silver,’ ‘Green,’ ‘Other’ — then dump a big mixed bowl of mini ornaments in the center of the table.

Players grab a printable score sheet and, before sorting a single ornament, first predict how many of each color they think are in the bowl.

After everyone has written their predictions, the group sorts the ornaments together into the cups as fast as possible — this part is a timed team activity, and yes, it gets chaotic.

Then the sheets come back out and players score points for the accuracy of their predictions.

Print one score sheet per guest before the party — the sheet has the five color categories, a blank prediction line for each, and a final count column to fill in after sorting.

You can grab a bunch of the plastic mini ornament sets from any dollar store or the holiday aisle at Target; a set of 50 mixed-color ornaments usually runs about three dollars and is more than enough.

Tape a number on each cup so the sorting is quick and unambiguous.

The timed team sort is where the energy spikes — set two minutes on the clock, put on ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You,’ and watch adults absolutely lose their minds trying to identify whether a sparkly orb is ‘gold’ or ‘more of a champagne, actually.’

The reason this game works brilliantly in a group setting is the blend of individual prediction strategy and collective chaos. Every guest feels invested — their sheet is personal, but the sorting is communal — which creates both cooperation and quiet competition simultaneously.

It also scales perfectly: 6 players or 30, the format holds. After the game is done, just leave the sorted cups out as a casual decoration for the table. Efficient and festive — two words every host loves to hear.

If you are looking for more ways to keep your holiday entertaining budget sensible, check out these tips for saving on seasonal entertaining that translate perfectly to Christmas party planning too.

7. Cup Phone Carol Guess

Remember making a ‘telephone’ with two cups and a piece of string as a kid? This game takes that nostalgic concept and turns it into a Christmas party challenge. Two players face away from the group, each holding one end of a cup-and-string phone.

One player receives a whispered Christmas carol title from the host, then hums it — just the melody, no words — directly into the cup. The other player listens through their cup and has to name the carol.

The group watches in complete silence, which is honestly the hardest part of the whole game. Get it right in under 30 seconds and you earn two points; take longer than that and you get one point; no guess means zero.

To set up the cup phone, poke a small hole in the bottom of two Solo cups, thread a piece of string (about six feet long) through both, and knot it on each end so it stays taut.

The string must be pulled tight for the sound to travel — a loose or curled string gives you nothing but muffled nonsense, which is also funny but defeats the purpose.

Write 10–15 carol titles on slips of paper and fold them into a bowl: ‘Jingle Bells,’ ‘Deck the Halls,’ ‘Silent Night,’ ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,’ ‘Frosty the Snowman,’ and the classic trap card, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ (nobody can hum that opening on command).

This game hits a beautiful sweet spot between silly and surprisingly tense. The hummer is always concentrating intensely, the listener is pressing the cup to their ear with extreme focus, and the audience is biting their cheeks to stay quiet until they absolutely cannot.

It works especially well mid-party when the group needs a game that is calm enough to stand around for but entertaining enough to hold everyone’s attention.

Bonus: pair up guests who don’t know each other well and you have got an instant icebreaker wrapped inside a game.

8. Ping Pong into Cups (Reindeer)

Line up eight Solo cups in a row on one side of a table — these are your ‘reindeer stalls.’ Label each cup with a reindeer name: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen.

Players stand at the opposite end of the table and take turns bouncing a ping pong ball, trying to land it in a specific cup called out by the host before each throw. Land it in Dasher’s stall? You score. Land it anywhere else?

The audience decides your penalty — usually a carol lyric recited from memory or a reindeer gallop around the table. The player who correctly lands a ball in the most named cups after three rounds wins.

The key setup detail is cup placement — put the cups close enough together that they create a genuine target cluster, but space them about one cup-width apart so each one is technically a distinct target.

Use a permanent marker to write the reindeer names boldly down the side of each cup so they are visible from the throwing end.

Lightweight ping pong balls bounce beautifully off most tables; if your table is uneven or too soft, a flat hardcover book makes a great throwing surface placed at one end.

Keep a small pile of backup balls on hand because they will bounce off the table, roll under the couch, and somehow end up in a different room entirely.

This is the game that turns quiet guests into trash-talkers, and I say that as the highest possible compliment. There is something deeply funny about a grown adult calling out ‘Vixen!’ with total seriousness and then proceeding to miss every single cup in the row.

Make it competitive over three rounds and you will have a genuine rivalry by round two.

For a variation, skip the named-cup element and just score points for any landed ball — perfect for younger players who don’t know their reindeer names (looking at you, Donner vs. Donder debate).

9. Stack and Nest Speed Round

This is the printable bracket companion to all the stacking games — a tournament-style score sheet that tracks head-to-head cup-stacking and cup-nesting speed rounds across the whole party.

The mechanic is simple: two players sit across from each other, each with an identical set of 10 Solo cups. Round One is a ‘stack’ round — who can build their column fastest?

Round Two is a ‘nest’ round — cups are scattered face-up and players race to nest them all into one tidy stack. The printable sheet records each head-to-head result and advances winners through the bracket until one champion is left.

The whole tournament can run across an entire evening with 30-second rounds, making it a perfect low-effort throughline game.

Print one bracket sheet per table (not per player) — it is a communal tracking document, not an individual score card.

The sheet has a 16-player single-elimination bracket tree printed on it, with blank name lines at each starting position and result boxes to fill in round by round. If you have fewer than 16 players, just leave some slots blank and start with byes.

You need one identical set of 10 cups per player pair for each round, which means 20 cups total for each ‘arena.’

Space is minimal, noise is maximum, and the competition gets genuinely intense by the semifinal round in a way that surprises everyone including the players.

What I love about turning this into a printable bracket is the way it extends the life of a simple game into a full party arc.

Guests will check the bracket sheet between other games, trash-talk their upcoming matchups, and cheer for their friends to advance. It creates a tournament culture at your party without requiring any extra materials beyond cups you already have and a single printed page.

Pro tip: announce the bracket matches over the ‘PA’ (your phone at speaker volume) between other games for maximum dramatic effect and to keep the whole party engaged even when they are not currently competing.

10. Cup Balance Head Walk

Players balance an empty Solo cup on top of their head and walk a set course from one end of the room to the other without touching the cup or letting it fall. Drop it and you restart from the beginning.

First player to complete the course with the cup still on their head wins the round. Sounds laughably easy until the second your hands swing naturally while walking and the cup wobbles, and then it is absolutely not easy at all.

Add a Christmas twist by putting a single lightweight ornament inside the cup — the shifting weight makes balance significantly harder and significantly funnier to watch.

Set a course through the party space: around a chair, past the tree, do a loop of the coffee table. About 20–30 feet of walking total hits the sweet spot between quick enough to be exciting and long enough to expose every wobbler.

Use lightweight plastic cups (the standard 16 oz Solo cups are ideal) and keep the ornament inside small and round so it rolls unpredictably.

If you want to turn this into a relay, teams of three each walk one segment of the course and tag the next teammate — drop the cup at any point and your leg of the relay restarts, while the other team cheerfully advances.

The reason Cup Balance Head Walk works at literally every type of gathering is that it is funny without being unkind. Watching someone walk with intense concentration while a cup slowly slides off their head is universally hilarious and completely harmless.

It is also one of the rare games where children, adults, and grandparents are all equally matched, which makes for surprisingly competitive inter-generational rounds.

My personal strategy is an extremely stiff neck and absolutely zero eye contact with anyone who might make me laugh — results: mixed, but memorable.

11. Blow the Cup off the Table

This is the lung-power challenge that levels the playing field completely — no coordination required, just breath. A Solo cup sits on the far edge of a table, upside-down.

Players lean over the near edge and blow as hard as they can, trying to propel the cup off the opposite end using only air. The catch: they cannot touch the table or move from their starting position.

Whoever blows the cup off the table in the fewest attempts wins the round. The printable score sheet turns this into a multi-round tournament with a running tally, because one round of Blow the Cup is never, ever enough.

Use lightweight cups for maximum blowability — the thinner-walled budget cups actually work better here than the heavy-duty party cups.

A standard six-foot folding table gives just enough distance to make the challenge genuinely hard; a shorter table makes it too easy and a dining table might be too wide depending on your lung capacity.

The Christmas variation: write a number on the bottom of each cup in advance and only reveal it once the cup is blown off — that number is a ‘bonus multiplier’ for the round, so even a slow blower who lands a high-number cup can leapfrog the standings.

The printed score card tracks each player’s attempt counts and bonus numbers per round.

What makes this game endlessly replayable is the way it looks totally achievable and then absolutely humbles you.

You will watch someone clear the cup in one powerful gust and think ‘yes, easy, I have this’ — and then blow four times and move it exactly three inches.

It is the kind of game where the audience screams louder than the player is breathing, which is the mark of a genuinely great party game.

Add a tiebreaker rule: if two players tie on attempts, they do a final simultaneous round and the audience judges whose technique looks more like a ‘proper Christmas elf blow.’

12. Cup Bowling with Ornaments

Set 10 Solo cups upside-down in a classic bowling-pin triangle at the end of a hallway or along one side of the room.

Players roll a round ornament — the solid plastic kind that won’t shatter, please, learn from my mistakes — from a marked line toward the cups and try to knock down as many as possible in two rolls, just like real bowling.

Strike means all 10 down in one roll; spare means clearing the rest in two. Keep score on a whiteboard or a piece of paper, play three frames per person, and crown the holiday bowling champion of the party.

The ornament ball is the star of this game — a 70mm round plastic ornament rolls beautifully on hardwood or laminate flooring and has just enough heft to topple a Solo cup satisfyingly without becoming a weapon.

(Carpet is harder; tile is faster; hardwood is the Goldilocks surface.) Number the cups 1–10 with a marker before the game so scoring disputes — and there will be scoring disputes — can be settled quickly.

For a festive variation, put a tiny slip of paper inside one cup with a ‘Secret Santa’ dare written on it. If a player knocks over that cup, they have to do the dare before their second roll.

Cup Bowling with Ornaments is one of those games that genuinely surprises people with how fun it is. It sounds low-key and ends up being genuinely competitive because bowling instincts kick in hard and fast.

The ornament’s slight unpredictability as a ball — it veers left, it curves right, it stops dead for no reason — makes every roll a small drama.

Keep a running leaderboard posted visibly so the standings are always on display, and watch guests scheme about when to play their round to maximize their chances of ending up on top.

13. Musical Cups (Carol Stop)

This is Musical Chairs, but with Solo cups instead of chairs and no one has to awkwardly hover over a seat. Set one fewer cup than the number of players face-down on a table or spread on the floor in a circle.

Play a Christmas carol, and everyone walks around the cups. The moment the music cuts, everyone scrambles to put one hand on a cup. The player without a cup is out. Remove one more cup and repeat until one winner remains.

The chaos-to-fun ratio on this game is, I will just say it, exceptional.

For setup, use 16 oz Solo cups turned upside-down — they are the perfect hand-sized target for a quick grab and stable enough not to tip over when twelve people lunge at them simultaneously.

Designate one person as the DJ (or use a Spotify Christmas playlist and have them randomly hit pause); the DJ should pause at unpredictable intervals to keep players on edge and prevent anyone from ‘camping’ near a cup.

A fun Christmas twist: eliminated players each have to pull a carol title from a bowl and sing the chorus a cappella before they officially take their seat on the sideline. This keeps the eliminated guests just as entertained as the active players.

Musical Cups is a fantastic mid-party reset game because it gets everyone moving and laughing at the same time, takes almost zero setup, and creates a clear winner in about five minutes.

It also has that perfect ‘I cannot believe I lost to Musical Cups’ energy that keeps people talking about it all night. For large groups, run two simultaneous tables and then hold a championship round between the two table winners.

The final-two showdown — one cup, two players, total silence, then the music cuts — is one of those genuinely electric party moments that everyone in the room stops what they are doing to watch.

14. Cup Catch Toss Duel

Two players face each other about four feet apart. Each holds a Solo cup in their throwing hand. One small item — a wrapped candy, a mini ornament, a jingle bell, a marshmallow — sits in one player’s cup.

They toss it upward from their cup and the other player must catch it in their cup without moving their feet. Then that player tosses it back. The duo scores one point per consecutive successful exchange. If it drops, the streak resets to zero.

The printable score card tracks each pair’s best streak and running total across three rounds, and the pair with the highest combined score wins the game.

This game has a beautiful escalating difficulty built right into it — the first three catches feel simple, around catch six you start getting cocky, and by catch nine your hands are trembling with concentration and the whole room is counting out loud with you.

Use a wrapped candy for the easiest version (lighter, floats longer), a jingle bell for medium difficulty (smaller target, more satisfying sound on a catch), and a mini ornament for the hardest mode (unpredictable aerodynamics, wildly entertaining misses).

Mark the floor distance with tape and enforce the no-foot-moving rule strictly; stepping forward to compensate for a bad toss is cheating and deeply unsatisfying.

The reason this one earns a printable score card is that it rewards persistence and repeat play. Pairs will want to best their streak over multiple rounds, and the printed card gives them a tangible target to chase.

It also works brilliantly as a partner-up icebreaker — assign the duos by drawing names from a cup (meta!)

so guests are paired with someone they might not know, and by the time they have done 20 rounds of cup catch together, they are absolutely friends.

Check out our 2025 Christmas Gift Guide if you want to grab a small prize stash for the winning pair — a little competitive incentive goes a very long way.

15. Build the Cup Christmas Tree

This is the grand finale game — the one you save for the end of the night when everyone is warmed up, competitive, and ready to go all-in on a truly ridiculous challenge.

Teams of two or three race to build the tallest freestanding Christmas tree structure they can using only Solo cups — no tape, no glue, no leaning against anything.

The shape has to be recognizably tree-like: wide at the bottom, narrowing toward a point at the top, with a single cup as the star on top. Tallest standing tree when the timer hits two minutes wins.

Any tree that topples before time is called is automatically disqualified, which creates genuinely agonizing final seconds.

The engineering here is more complicated than it looks.

The physics of stacking cups into a tapered pyramid means the base needs to be wide enough to support the upper levels — teams that go tall too fast will watch their tree collapse at the 90-second mark with maximum drama.

Give each team 30 cups to work with, which is enough for a respectable tree but requires genuine strategy about how wide to go at the base.

A fun host variation: add three ‘ornament cups’ per team — cups with a jingle bell placed inside them — which must be incorporated somewhere in the tree structure. The bells add weight and instability, making the build significantly harder.

Build the Cup Christmas Tree is the perfect closing game because it gives every personality type a role: the visionary who designs the structure, the careful builder who places each cup, and the nervous one who hovers with hands out to catch anything that wobbles.

It is genuinely collaborative and genuinely tense, and when a tree survives the full two minutes and the timer goes off, the celebration feels completely earned.

End the night by letting the winning team knock down their tree in one dramatic sweep — because after all these christmas games with solo cups, there is truly no better sendoff than a cascade of red plastic and the sound of everyone losing it completely.

And if you are already plotting next year’s gathering, our Christmas gift guide for parents has some great ideas for the hosts who deserve a little something extra for pulling all of this off.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Solo cups do I need for a Christmas party with 15 games?

For all 15 of these christmas games with solo cups, a case of 100 cups will cover most activities comfortably for a group of 8–12 people.

Some games like Cup Pyramid Speed Build and Build the Cup Christmas Tree use 21–30 cups per round, so if you are running those simultaneously with large teams, grab two cases to be safe.

The good news: a 100-count pack of Solo cups costs under five dollars at most grocery stores or big-box retailers, so doubling up is barely a budget consideration.

Are these Solo cup Christmas games appropriate for kids?

Most of them are absolutely kid-friendly — Snowman Cup Stack Race, Cup Bowling with Ornaments, Musical Cups, Guess Under the Cup, and Cup Balance Head Walk all work brilliantly for children ages 5 and up.

The only games to adapt for younger kids are Flip the Cup Christmas Relay (use water instead of any drink, and shorten the flip distance) and Cup Tower Knockdown Toss (move the throwing line closer and use softer balls).

Overall, these games are designed for mixed groups, so kids and adults can all play together.

Can I play these Christmas Solo cup games at an office party?

Yes — the vast majority of these games are completely office-appropriate and work brilliantly for workplace Christmas parties. Flip the Cup Christmas Relay can be played with sparkling cider, hot cocoa, or just water.

Cup Phone Carol Guess, Guess Under the Cup, Sort Ornaments into Cups, Musical Cups, and the stacking games all require zero liquid and create zero awkwardness. They work in conference rooms, break rooms, or any open office space with a few tables pushed together.

What do I put inside the cups for the Guess Under the Cup ornament game?

Small plastic ornaments from the dollar store are perfect — they fit neatly under a Solo cup and won’t roll away when you lift the cup to reveal them.

You can also use jingle bells, mini felt Christmas figures, wrapped candies, or even folded slips of paper with holiday dares written on them.

Avoid glass ornaments (breakage risk if a cup is knocked over) and anything too tall or wide that would visibly tent the cup and give away the location.

How do I set up all 15 games without turning my house into a disaster zone?

The trick is running games in rotation rather than setting everything up at once.

Group the games into three ‘stations’ — a stacking station (Snowman Stack Race, Cup Pyramid Build, Stack and Nest), a toss station (Ping Pong Reindeer, Cup Bowling, Cup Tower Knockdown), and a table station (Guess Under the Cup, Blow the Cup, Musical Cups).

Set up one station at a time and rotate guests through. The printable games (Sort Ornaments, Score Cards, Bracket Sheets) can be set up on a side table all evening with no reset needed.

Do I need to print anything for these Christmas cup games?

Three of the 15 games have printable score sheets that add a lot of structure and replay value: Sort Ornaments into Cups (prediction score sheet), Stack and Nest Speed Round (tournament bracket), Blow the Cup off the Table (score card), and Cup Catch Toss Duel (streak tracker).

These are all simple one-page prints — black and white is totally fine — and printing one per game takes about two minutes. The other 11 games need nothing printed at all, just cups and whatever small props are listed in the ‘You’ll need’ section.

There you have it — 15 christmas games with solo cups that prove you do not need a big budget or a complicated setup to throw a genuinely great holiday party.

A bag of cups, a handful of ornaments, and this list is honestly all you need. Print the score sheets, label a few cups with reindeer names, draw some snowman faces, and you are ready.

Try one tonight, pin this for later, or send it to whoever is hosting this year and let them be the holiday hero.

And if you are still figuring out what to get everyone once the games are done, our gift guide for colleagues has you covered for every person on your list.

📌 Save These for Later

Loved these? Pin your favorite image below so you can find this list again when you’re planning.