Wink Murder

4 shiney stars

Wink Murder is a classic game that has been around for decades!  

Everyone sits in a circle, and a leader goes and picks two people while everyone is closing their eyes. The people that are picked are the winkers, but only the leader knows that.

When the leader announces, everyone can open their eyes and look around at other people. The winker's objectives are to 'kill' everyone in the room. They do this by making eye contact with someone and winking at them. 

If you are winked at, you have to wait five seconds, then "die", dramatically or not.

Everyone else has to look around and try and identify the "killers".  When both killers are identified, the game is over.  

This game is really quite fun.

 



Features
  • Free / Low Cost
  • No equipment needed
  • Night
Objectives
  • Ice breaker
Space
  • Indoor
  • Large area
  • Small area
Age
  • Primary or Elementary School
  • Teens (Age 12-15)
  • Teens (Age 16-18)
  • Young Adults

Group Size
  • Small Groups (1-9 people)
  • Medium (10-29 people)

Duration
  • Medium (11-29 mins)
  • Short (1-10 minutes)
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Comments

I used to play this in my highschol drama class. Best way to die is touch an electrical fence LOL!!
- Andrea (13 Sep 2009)

HOW TO IDENTIFY KILLERS?
- JAY-R (27 Sep 2009)

There is also another way to play this game. Have everyone in a circle and close their eyes. Then, someone who is not playing pick one or two "monsters". (Pick the monster(s) by tapping everyone's head once but the monster's twice). Then, everyone sit close and hides their hands behind their knee and the people next to them. The "monster" sends out pulses by squeezing a hand next to them. If they squeeze their neighbor's hand 4 times, the neighbor squeezes the next person's hand 3 times and so on. Anyone who gets one pulse (or squeeze) is out. You can guess the monster after someone gets out. But, if someone is out, they can't guess the monster. Once the monster is guessed correctly, the game is over.
- JB (29 Oct 2009)

I love wink murder! ...This monster version though, are others in the circle allowed to talk about how many squeezes they had when trying to identify the monster? cause surely it would be really easy to do then.
Cheers :)
- Jessie (2 Feb 2010)

Love the idea... plus JB's monster version sounds pretty cool too. =]
- Roman (12 Sep 2010)

i made it like an elimination, after 2 people died we would all vote on who the winker was. The reason i did it like this is because everyone would just shout out random names and without any consequence for doing it like that it quickly got out of hand. Doing it as a vote made it more fun. If people were indecisive, we would just go for a couple more kills. I also made it so that if there were 5 people remaining and 2 of them were winkers, they automatically won. or 3 people 1 winker.

If you got voted as possible winker, you could either play the game in 2 different ways... either they are eliminated, or stay in the game everyone knowing they are not the winker, but they still had voting privileges and could persuade people to vote against certain people. if you died... you can't vote.
- Luigi (29 Mar 2011)

Another really good games is "I love you but you can't make me laugh" -

The group stand in a circle, then a player says "I love you but I can't make you laugh" to a member of the group. If they laugh then they say "I love you but I can't make you laugh" to another member of the group. If not, player tries another person.
- Sarah (13 Oct 2012)

The winker's objectives are to 'kill' everyone in the room? Then the winker and all others involved would land in jail (Real jail)
- Baru (13 May 2013)

We've played this for years, with a few variations - In groups of about 15 or less, we only have one "killer", and they are chosen at random by passing out playing cards, of which one is the ace of Spades. That person is the winker/killer. No one can make an accusation until someone "dies". If you want to accuse someone, you have to raise your hand and say "I have an accusation" before you accuse. That gives the killer a slim chance to kill his accuser. If you accuse wrong, you are out of the game. I always have to remind the players not to respond when they look at their card. Saying, "Man, this is the same card I got last time!" is just as telling as saying, "Oh, it's me (or not me) again!"
- ft (1 Aug 2014)

I've played so many versions of this game. I find it works well to pick one detective and they have 3-4 guesses to find the murderer/s. Another fun variation is to have everyone walk around while playing, the detective then has to try and keep track of who was interacting with who before they died
- Arianna (16 Feb 2017)

We did "wink wink asleep", because our youth gorup elders didn't like the idea of murdering someone.
- Troy Wright (25 Sep 2019)

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