As the holiday season gets underway, many parties and gatherings might include a gift exchange. Along with Secret Santas and cookie swaps, guests might be invited to participate in a White Elephant gift exchange. 

White Elephants are a little different from other gift exchanges. Participants can steal gifts from other players, and more customized versions of the game can include cards and dice to really mix things up. 

Here’s what to know about the rules of White Elephant and how to best play the game. 

What are the basic White Elephant rules? 

To start, anyone who wants to participate in a White Elephant has to bring a gift. Often, those gifts will be silly or impractical. Players will select from the gift pool in an assigned order: Guests can draw straws to see who will go when, or the host can set an order prior to the event. Anything works, as long as people know when they’ll be up. 

When it’s time for the game to begin, the first player will select a gift. For most variations of the game, it’s important to make sure everyone knows what the player picked — this will be important later! 

When the second player goes, they’ll have two options: They can open a new gift, or steal the previous player’s gift. If a player gets a gift stolen from them, they then get to pick again before the game progresses to the next participant. The game will continue like that until every participant has a gift. After the last player has picked a gift, the first player will get the chance to steal, if they want. 

To keep the game moving, there are some limits on stealing. Usually, a present can only be stolen once per turn, so if the second participant steals a gift from the first, the first player can’t take the gift back immediately. But if the first player gets their gift stolen a second time, they can then reclaim their gift from the second player. It’s also common to automatically end the turn after three swaps, so the game doesn’t grind to a halt. 

How can you customize White Elephant rules? 

White Elephant rules can be customized in a variety of ways. To start, you can remove limits on steals or swaps per turn, but be warned that this will likely slow down the game. 

Players can also take those limits even more seriously. In some versions of the game, if a gift is swapped three times, it’s considered out of the game and cannot be stolen again, which means the person who is holding it after the third steal gets to keep it. In other versions, a player can be considered out of the game if they are stolen from three times. That means they can no longer be stolen from, and get to keep whatever gift they are holding at the time. 

White Elephant organizers could also set a theme for gifts, or keep them wrapped until after the game has ended to add an element of mystery. 

There are also ways to make White Elephants more complicated. White Elephant organizers could play the “dice game” variation, which incorporates a pair of die and a rules sheet created by the gift organizer. In this variation, players can select their playing order based on dice rolls. When the time for picking gifts starts, the first player will roll the dice, and then do whatever the corresponding item on the rules sheet is. Some versions don’t allow players to unwrap their gifts until told to do so by the rules sheet. In those cases, the game can continue until all players have unwrapped their gifts. 

There’s also a card game version with similar rules to the dice game. In this variation, players use cards to determine the order in which they’ll play and which actions they’ll take. 

Do you wrap a White Elephant gift? 

White Elephant gifts should be wrapped, especially if you are playing a version with a rules sheet or playing cards that dictate certain actions. Players will usually unwrap the gifts when the gift is first selected, unless the gift exchange is using a variation where gifts aren’t unwrapped until the end. 

What is the usual budget for a White Elephant gift exchange? 

The budget for a White Elephant is usually on the lower side. WhiteElephantRules.com recommends a $20 budget cap for most gatherings. 

Another variation of White Elephant could have a zero dollar budget — asking players to re-gift items or bring homemade presents.  

Why is it called White Elephant? 

A “white elephant” is generally something that’s expensive to maintain and hard to sell or get rid of — more trouble than it’s worth, in other words. The phrase is widely regarded coming from a legend about the King of Siam. In the myth, which the New York Times called “almost certainly apocryphal,” the King of Siam, who ruled an area now known as Thailand, would give someone who had made him unhappy a white elephant as a gift, which the person would then have to take care of despite not having a use for it. So while the gifts at a Christmas White Elephant exchange aren’t usually expensive, they’re often silly or impractical.