Lightweight Games Worth Packing for a Backpacking Trip

What actually works out there

Camp games have constraints that living-room games don't, and most of the ones you'd think to bring fail on at least one:

Wind. The great destroyer. Cards, paper, and anything light enough to carry is also light enough to leave. A game that requires laying out a spread on a flat surface is a fair-weather game.

Gloves and cold hands. By 8 p.m. in the mountains, fine motor control is gone. Tiny pieces become impossible to pick up and easy to lose.

Darkness. Everything now happens in a single cone of headlamp light, which is also full of moths.

The pieces problem. A game with forty small components is a game you will end up looking for on your hands and knees with a headlamp while someone says "it's fine, it's fine, we can play without it." Loose plastic in the backcountry is litter. It isn't a charming trail mystery.

Teaching time. If explaining the rules takes twenty minutes, nobody plays it twice. Tired people have a very short patience budget.

The games that survive all five are surprisingly few. Here are the ones that do.

A standard deck is about 3–4 oz; six small dice and a pouch are often 1–2 oz; a golf pencil and folded score sheet are well under an ounce. Weigh the actual kit, including its windproof surface and container.

A small deck of cards

Still the champion. Under two ounces, endlessly reusable, and everybody already knows at least one game.

For a group with mixed enthusiasm, High-Low is the right starting point because it can be taught in one sentence. Flip a card. Guess whether the next one is higher or lower. Right guess, one point, keep going. Wrong guess, you're done, pass it on. First to a set number wins. It's genuinely dumb and it's truly fun and it makes people talk trash within about ninety seconds, which is the actual goal.

If the group has any appetite for structure: cribbage with a paper score sheet is superb for two people and rewards being played badly. Hearts works for four. Go Fish works for anyone under nine and, after a long day, anyone over thirty-five.

Two practical notes. Get plastic-coated or all-plastic cards; paper cards die in one damp night. And count them before they go back in the pouch, every single time, without exception, even when everyone's tired and someone's already zipped the tent.

Cribbage and Hearts are compact but poor choices when nobody already knows them. If teaching time is part of the constraint, use High-Low, Go Fish, or one familiar house game instead.

Six dice in a bag

Even lighter, and immune to wind if you have something to roll into.

A workable six-dice version gives each player three rolls, setting aside any matching values between rolls. Score one point per die in your largest matching set. First to ten wins. Four rounds is about twenty minutes.

Roll into a clean pot lid or a mug, not onto the ground, unless you enjoy the specific feeling of watching a die bounce twice and disappear into a crack between two boulders forever. And if you do lose one, let it go. Do not go down a slope after a die. This should not need saying and it does.

Complete rule: roll all six dice, set aside every die matching the chosen target, and reroll the rest. Set-aside dice stay fixed. If a roll adds no match, the turn ends; otherwise keep rolling until all six match or the player banks the count. Highest banked count after an agreed number of rounds wins.

Games that weigh nothing at all

The zero-gear tier is underrated. It works in the dark, in the rain, in a tent, while you're waiting for water to boil, and while you're still walking.

• Alphabet trail. Name something from the trip, A to Z. Skips allowed for X, because we're not monsters.
• Last-letter chain. Pick a category. Each word starts with the last letter of the previous one. It falls apart hilariously around the fourth round.
• Describe and draw. One person describes an object without naming it; another draws it. The gap between the description and the drawing is where the entertainment lives.
• Tiny debate. Two people get sixty seconds each to defend opposite sides of something completely inconsequential. Sunrise versus sunset. Whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Whether the group's route choice on Tuesday was, in fact, a shortcut. Keep it to things nobody has actual feelings about.
• Two truths and a lie is a cliché because it asks almost nothing of a group and usually gets strangers talking quickly.

The wind problem, solved

Lay a bandana or a turned-inside-out stuff sack on flat ground. Weight the corners with small stones you've picked up from an already-bare surface and will put back exactly where you found them. Don't pry rocks out of anything — not a wall, not a bank, definitely not anything that looks like somebody built it on purpose.

Hold your cards in your hand rather than fanning them out on the ground when there's any breeze. Get high-contrast pieces — white dice and light-backed cards are dramatically easier to find with a headlamp than the cool-looking black ones.

Inside the tent, keep everything away from sleeping bag zippers, which swallow small objects, and away from condensation on the walls.

A thirty-minute camp evening that actually works

Five minutes of word chain while the water heats. This costs nothing and gets people talking while somebody's crouched over a stove being antisocial.

Dinner, then cleanup, then everything scented goes into storage before the game comes out — not after, not "in a minute." Food and game pieces should never be on the same cloth at the same time.

Then two ten-minute rounds of cards or dice, in whatever light is left.

Finish with a five-minute story prompt in the tent, quiet voices, headlamps on the red setting. The last thing before sleep should be something that winds down rather than something that gets everyone laughing at 10:15 p.m. in a campground with quiet hours.

Then stop. The best camp entertainment usually turns into conversation, or someone reading, or four people staring at the last of the light on the ridge and not saying anything, and you should let that happen when it starts.

Test it at home, in the stupid conditions

Before a game earns a place in the pack, run it once in your garden at night. Wear gloves. Use a headlamp. Open the pouch, explain the rules, play a full round, count the pieces, put it away. Time the whole thing and weigh the whole kit — cards, dice, pencil, score paper, pouch, and any surface you need to make it work. A "tiny" deck that needs a rigid case is not a tiny deck.

Write the rules on an index card and put it in the pouch. You will not remember the scoring for a game you played once, in June, and neither will anyone else, and the ensuing argument is only fun the first time.

The awkward-beginner-question section

Will people think I'm dorky for bringing a game? For approximately four minutes, and then it will be 7:15 and you will be the most popular person at the site.

What if nobody wants to play? Then nobody plays. Ask once, cheerfully, and drop it. Nothing kills a camp evening faster than an activity someone is enforcing.

Do I bring a game on a solo trip? Bring a small notebook or a puzzle page instead. Multiplayer games are grim alone. A pencil and a blank page at a campsite is one of the better things going.

How many games should I bring? One that you know works, plus a zero-gear fallback that weighs nothing. Three unfamiliar games is how you end up carrying three unfamiliar games for forty miles.

And the obvious caveat, stated once

If the weather's turning, if the route needs planning, if something's broken, if the food isn't put away, or if everyone is truly exhausted — skip it. The game is the thing you do after the trip is handled, not instead. Nobody has ever come home and said the problem was that they didn't play enough cards.