Leaves and Letters Fall Party Game

If you’re looking for a fun fall game to play at your next fall party, this one is perfect for pretty much any occasion! With variations to play in teams or play it individually, this easy to setup fall party game is a great option for fall festivals, fall family game nights, and more!

Leaf Themed Fall Game

We played this game as part of our Halloween tournament of terror (aka where we played a bunch of Halloween games for adults in teams), and it was easily one of my favorites!

The general idea is this – teams have to compete to find leaves with letters written on them in buckets full of leaves. The first team to find all of their leaves and unscramble the word wins.

Sounds easy right? It is but it’s a little trickier (and way more fun) than that! You’ll definitely want to add it to your next fall party!

This game is simple but does require a few things to play. Here’s what you’ll need:

• Leaves – I bought a couple of this pack of leaves and it worked perfectly!
• Buckets – you’ll need one less than the number of teams playing, we had three teams competing so had two buckets. You can use plastic storage buckets, boxes, etc. as long as they’re big enough for sifting through a bunch of leaves.
• Black Sharpie – I highly recommend using black so the letters are visible on the leaves!

Setting up this game is probably the most important part. It’s simple but needs to be done carefully or you could ruin the entire game!

1 – Choose Your Word

The first thing you need to do is choose the word that you want to use for the game. I chose a nine letter word (nightmare) but you could do any word that has 7+ letters (anything under seven is probably too short) as long as there are no repeating the letters in the word. If there are repeating letters, the game won’t work!

Choose a word that fits your theme whether it’s fall, Halloween, pumpkin, or a festival. Get creative but make sure it’s a word that people will be able to recognize pretty easily once they get unscrambling.

If you need some ideas, here are some great fall and Halloween themed words with no repeating letters:

• Six letter words – golden, jacket, layers, nutmeg, nature, orange, candle, zombie, goblin, casket, witchy, corpse, makeup
• Seven letter words – vampire, haunted, harvest, bonfire, hayride, blanket, foliage, monster, costume, ghostly, holiday
• Eight letter words – campfire, festival, cauldron, frighten
• Nine letter words – nightmare, bogeyman, pitchfork

Write the letters of the word on leaves, making one set per team playing. So for our game with three teams, I wrote N-I-G-H-T-M-A-R-E out on nine leaves, three separate times so I had three sets of leaves with the words.

Then split each of those sets of leaves (e.g., divide NIGHTMARE in half) and put half in one bucket and half in the other (or split into more parts if you have more buckets). You want everyone to have to search through each of the buckets to find their leaves!

2 – Setup the Buckets

Once your letters are in the buckets, it’s time to fill up the buckets with the rest of the leaves. Divide the leaves into the buckets, trying to keep them evenish but don’t spend too much time on it.

Once your buckets are ready to go, place them on the far end of an open playing area and have teams stand on the opposite side, each taking their own little area where they can work on unscrambling their letters.

The first thing you need to do is divide your players. Each team needs to choose two people to be unscramblers. The rest of the teammates will be runners. Have the runners decide on a running order – everyone that isn’t unscrambling needs to run.

When you say go, the first runner from each team will race to the buckets of leaves. Their goal is to find a leaf with a letter on it and run it back to their team. If they bring back a letter they already have, they must run back and return it immediately.

One catch though, there can only be one runner at a bucket at a time. If a runner arrives at a bucket and there is a person there, they have to challenge them to a game of rock, paper, scissors to win the chance to look through that bucket.

The winner gets to search for a letter and the loser has to find a new bucket. If a bucket is open, they can just start searching in the bucket. If someone is already at that new bucket, the loser can challenge that person to a game of rock, paper, scissors too. If they lose again, they have to wait until someone leaves a bucket open to start searching.

The game continues with runners retrieving letters from the bucket, challenging rock, paper, scissors, until one of the teams only has one letter left. Once there’s only one letter left to go, teams no longer have to play rock, paper, scissors to win a chance at a bucket – anyone can search any bucket for the remainder of the game and multiple people can be searching the same bucket at the same time!

How to Win

The first team to correctly unscramble the word with all of their letters wins.

If you want to use this concept but don’t want to do it quite like we did, here are some alternative options you could use for different types of parties, still using letters and leaves!

Find a Letter and Win a Prize

Put letters on leaves and put them in a bucket then have players run down, find a leaf with a letter, and bring it back. Whatever letter they bring back goes along with a prize associated with that letter. You could make them match (like P wins a pumpkin prize, A wins an Apple prize, E wins an eraser, etc.) or just do fall colored bags with letters on the front.

If you don’t want to do letters, you could also do colored dots or stickers and they get the matching prize.

Unscramble a Prize

Set the game up like my scrambled egg hunt with prizes available for teams to win. Teams have to run down and find letters in the leaves that go along with the prizes they want to win. The first team to get all the letters in a prize wins that prize!

Dot to Dot

Use colored dots for teams instead of letters if you’re doing this with younger kids! The first team to find all the leaves (or say five leaves with dots) with dots wins. If you want to make it easier, make it the first team to find five leaves with their colored dots but put double that number in the buckets.

If you want more fall party ideas to go with these ones, check out these next!

• Fall scavenger hunt – three different fall scavenger hunt ideas including ones for kids and adults!
• Fall bucket list – tons of great fall activities and a printable bucket list to fill out!
• Pumpkin worksheets – these are great to put on a table for kids to work on during parties!
• Fall art projects – tons of fall craft ideas for kids like this fun apple craft, this pumpkin patch craft, and more!
• Fall snack mix – one of my favorite fall party secrets is this delicious snack mix!