Left Right Story Game: How to Play, Plus a Funny Christmas Story to Read Aloud

The left right story game is a gift-passing game played in a circle. One person reads a story out loud, every LEFT moves the wrapped gift one seat to the left, and every RIGHT moves it one seat to the right. Whoever is holding a gift when the last line is read keeps it.

The rule works at showers, birthdays and holiday celebrations, in three setups: a single prize at a baby shower, a few small gifts at a bridal shower, or a gift from every guest at a Christmas exchange.

Below are the rules, how to pick a setup, a Christmas story with 45 cues you can read tonight, and how to write your own story so nobody opens the present they brought.

How to play the left right story game

The game needs a story, one reader and a circle of chairs. The host page in our five-story baby shower set lays it out in four steps, and every version of the game runs on the same bones:

1. Sit everyone in a circle and hand one wrapped prize to the mom-to-be, or whoever the party is for.
2. Pick a story and read it out loud, slowly at first.
3. Every time you hear LEFT, pass the prize to your left. Every time you hear RIGHT, or the family name WRIGHT, pass it to your right.
4. Whoever is holding the prize on the very last line keeps it.

Most of the laughs come from the other meanings of the two words, the ones that have nothing to do with directions.

“There was one cookie left” and “she was right on time” both count, so the room can’t relax just because the story has stopped giving directions.

Pull the chairs in close. The host tips in the same set say everyone should be able to reach both neighbors without standing up.

A prize that has to be carried across a gap slows every pass, and the reader won’t wait.

Each cue moves a gift one seat, no more. If two cues land close together, the gift goes one seat and then the next, even when the reader is already a sentence ahead.

Three ways to set up the left right game: one prize, a few gifts or one each

Once you know the rule, the real choice is how many gifts go around the circle. That decides how many people win and how long the game feels.

One prize, one winner. This is the usual shower setup: the guest of honor starts with a single wrapped prize and everyone else passes it along.

Guests don’t need to bring anything, which makes it the easiest setup to plan.

The group-size notes in our five-story set say six to ten guests lets the prize lap the circle several times. Ten to twenty is called the sweet spot, and above twenty the advice is to read faster.

If you play several rounds, use a different prize for each story, so each round has its own winner.

A few gifts, several winners. Our bridal shower game uses three to five small wrapped gifts, handed out so they start well apart. Every LEFT or RIGHT moves all of them one seat at once.

If two gifts reach the same guest, that guest holds both and passes both.

The how-to-play page suggests starting with five gifts when there are more than twenty guests.

One gift each, a full exchange. At a Christmas or office gift exchange, every guest brings a wrapped present and sits holding it. On each cue, every gift in the circle moves at the same time, and when the story ends everyone opens what’s in their hands.

Set a price limit when you send the invitation, so the gifts are roughly comparable.

This setup has one trap the others don’t: a guest can finish the story holding the gift they brought. The next section shows why that happens and how to check a story for it beforehand.

For a dice exchange, decide each transfer as a completed swap or group pass so no guest finishes a move without a gift. Use the six-card host plan if you’d like a ready-to-prepare selection instead of following all 48 cards.

If your group wants a longer swap with steals, our Roll & Swap Dice Gift Exchange moves the presents with dice and action cards instead of a story. Its bring-one, leave-with-one mode runs for twelve rounds or until a timer goes off.

Why a left right game can hand your own gift back

Every cue moves every gift one seat, so a LEFT and a RIGHT cancel each other out. The arithmetic is simple: what matters at the end isn’t how many cues the story has. It’s the difference between them.

Count the RIGHTs, count the LEFTs and subtract. If the story has 24 RIGHTs and 21 LEFTs, each gift finishes three seats to the right of where it started, as long as everyone passed on every cue.

In a gift exchange, that means everybody opens the present that started three seats to their left.

The trouble starts when the difference is zero. Then every gift goes back to its owner, and the whole exchange was a very long way of keeping your own present.

The same thing happens when the difference equals the number of people in the circle, or any multiple of it. Every gift has simply gone all the way around.

A difference of 6 in a circle of six, or 5 in a circle of five, sends everything home.

The write-your-own page in our five-story set gives the rule of thumb from the prize side: finish with two or three more RIGHTs than LEFTs, so the prize doesn’t land back where it started.

Check a downloaded story beforehand. Open the PDF, search for “left” and then for “right,” and note the two totals. Skip any hit buried inside another word, like “bright,” unless your group counts sound-alikes.

In a real circle, one missed pass shifts a gift by a seat, so the arithmetic only tells you where the gifts should end up. That’s still enough to spot a story that sends everyone home.

A funny left right Christmas story to read aloud

Here’s a story that passes that check. It’s written for a Christmas gift exchange where every guest holds a present, though it works just as well with a single prize.

The story has 45 cues, 24 RIGHTs and 21 LEFTs, so each gift ends three seats to the right. In any circle of more than three people, nobody should end up with their own gift, as long as everyone passes on every cue.

The cue words are in capitals so the reader can see what’s coming. Read the first few paragraphs at an easy pace and speed up toward the end.

Aunt Linda and the Flamingo Tape

Aunt Linda had one job this Christmas: get the family gifts to Grandma’s house by six o’clock.

At four-thirty she still had nine presents LEFT to wrap and not one inch of tape LEFT in the kitchen drawer.

“All RIGHT,” she told the cat. “Nobody panic.”

She grabbed her keys, ran RIGHT out the door, came RIGHT back for her coat, turned LEFT out of the driveway and drove RIGHT past the hardware store, which had closed at four.

She turned RIGHT at the gas station, LEFT at the library and pulled up RIGHT outside the neighborhood drugstore.

The only roll of tape LEFT on the shelf was covered in tiny pink flamingos. “That’ll do RIGHT fine,” she told the cashier, who didn’t look completely convinced.

Back home, she wrapped the scarf for Uncle Ray, the puzzle for Grandpa and a pair of fuzzy socks for everyone else.

Finished gifts went in a pile on her LEFT, unfinished ones on her RIGHT, and the cat lay down RIGHT across both.

By five-fifteen there was one gift LEFT to find: the big one for her sister, who had LEFT hints about it since Thanksgiving.

It wasn’t in the hall closet on the LEFT. It wasn’t under the bed on the RIGHT side. It was in the trunk of the car, RIGHT where she had LEFT it on Black Friday.

Halfway down the driveway, she realized she had LEFT everything else on the kitchen table.

She ran back inside, grabbed the pile on the LEFT, forgot the pile on the RIGHT and had to go back a second time.

She turned RIGHT, then LEFT, then RIGHT onto the highway, and got stuck behind a snowplow in the RIGHT lane.

She moved over to the LEFT lane. The snowplow moved over to the LEFT lane too.

She gave up, took the next exit on the RIGHT, turned LEFT at the church and RIGHT onto Maple Street.

At Grandma’s, her nephew opened the door. “You’re RIGHT on time,” he said, which, remarkably, nobody had said to Aunt Linda in eleven years.

Grandma hugged her RIGHT there on the porch.

She set the gifts under the tree, to the LEFT of the fireplace, and stepped back. Every bow was held on with a flamingo, and the one on the far LEFT was upside down.

“Those are the ugliest bows I’ve ever seen,” said Grandpa from the RIGHT end of the couch.

“You’re RIGHT,” said Aunt Linda, “and there’s no tape LEFT in this whole town, so you’ll have to love them.”

Everybody laughed, someone turned the music up, and Uncle Ray went RIGHT for the gingerbread and LEFT none for anybody else.

Aunt Linda looked LEFT at the tree, then RIGHT at her family, and decided the day had turned out all RIGHT after all.

Stop passing! Whatever gift is in your hands is yours to keep. Merry Christmas.

Left right games for a baby shower or bridal shower

Showers usually play the game differently from a Christmas exchange in two ways. Guests pass one prize instead of swapping gifts, and the stories often lean on a family named Wright, whose name counts as a RIGHT every time it’s read.

Our shop has two baby shower versions of the same game. They play the same way, so choose one by how many rounds you want and how big the shower is.

One page, one round. The one-page left right baby shower game prints the four rules and the whole story on a single sheet. The story, The Wright Family Welcomes a Baby, runs about 410 words with 52 cues, and you print one copy for the reader.

The Wright name does a lot of the work. When Uncle Wright gets the baby’s name wrong, the story adds that he “did not have it WRIGHT,” and the prize moves again.

Five stories, several rounds. The five-story baby shower set has five different stories of about 500 words each, one per page, with around 50 cues apiece. It adds a page of variations, a write-your-own story page, a winner certificate and six prize tags.

The variations page helps at a longer shower: a new prize for each story, two circles racing through one story for a big group, a new reader each round, and one story saved for after the cake.

If the shower has room for one short game in a living room, the single page covers it.

If you want a game you can come back to two or three times throughout one afternoon, the five-story set is the one to pick. Either one runs the whole game independently, so there’s no need for both.

Bridal showers. The left right bridal shower game has three wedding stories and uses three to five small gifts at once, so more than one guest goes home with something.

It’s written for 10 to 20 guests and comes with a quick reference card the reader can cut out and hold.

Its stories are full of sound-alikes, which brings up a rule you’ll want to settle before you write a story of your own.

How to write your own left right story

A homemade story is the best one to read last, because it can be personalized for the people in the room. The write-your-own page in our five-story set suggests a story about the guest of honor, saved for the final round so nobody sees it coming.

Pick a plot that moves. Errands, road trips, lost keys and anything with a map give you turns to make and things to leave behind.

A story built around a conversation at a kitchen table gives you almost nothing to work with.

Use every meaning of both words. Most of your cues won’t be directions:

• LEFT: she left the restaurant, one slice left, left over, left behind, left on read
• RIGHT: right away, right on time, all right, you’re right, right here, the right size

A sentence like “The only seat left was on the right” moves the gifts twice without sounding like driving instructions.

Aim for about 50 cues. The same page puts that at roughly two minutes of reading, and it says to write the cue words in capitals so you can spot them at speed.

Decide on sound-alikes before you start. Our bridal game has a rule printed on its how-to-play page: if a word sounds like LEFT or RIGHT, it counts. Wright, write, upright and leftover all move the gifts.

That rule makes a story harder and funnier, but only if everybody understands it. Say it out loud before the first line, the way the bridal game suggests, or leave the sound-alikes out.

Count before you print. Add up the RIGHTs and the LEFTs, and make sure the difference is two or three and not the same as the number of guests.

If it’s zero, change one “left” to “gone” or add a “right away.”

Read it out loud once. A sentence that looks fine on paper can pile three cues so close together that nobody can physically pass that fast.

Spread them out and put a few quiet sentences between the busiest ones.

Hosting tips for reading a left right story aloud

Once the story is written, the reader controls the whole game, and most of the fun or frustration comes from the pace.

Start slow, then speed up. Both of our baby shower games say to start slowly and speed up near the end, where the mix-ups are the best part. The five-story set adds the reason: slow opening lines let guests learn the rhythm.

Lean on the cue words. The reader’s notes in our bridal game say to hit LEFT and RIGHT a little harder than the rest of the sentence, so the room hears them coming.

Don’t stop for mistakes. The same notes say to keep a steady pace, not slow down for stragglers and not stop to fix mistakes.

A gift accidentally going the wrong way is part of the game.

Keep the prize small and light. It’s going to travel a long way. The five-story set suggests a candle, a bar of good chocolate, a small plant or a gift card, and wrapping the prize in clear cellophane so people can see what they’re passing.

Hand the reading around. For a second or third round, give the story to a different guest. Everyone reads differently, and the reader gets a turn to laugh at the circle.

Playing over a video call. The five-story set’s variations page has an answer for that too: guests pass an imaginary parcel and tap their screen instead.

For printed stories, print at actual size rather than fit to page, so the text lands where it was laid out. How to print at actual size shows where that setting is.

If ink is short, the black-and-white version of our five-story baby shower set marks LEFT with a solid underline and RIGHT with a dotted one, so the reader can still tell them apart.

More games for showers, birthdays and holiday celebrations are in our printable party games.