White elephant rules

Everyone brings one wrapped gift, usually within a price range agreed beforehand, and the gifts go in a pile. Each player draws a number, and turns go in that order.

Player 1 picks a gift from the pile and unwraps it. From then on, each player has a choice when their turn comes. They can unwrap a new gift from the pile, or steal a gift someone has already opened. A player whose gift is stolen does the same: they unwrap a new gift or steal another one. A turn ends when someone unwraps a gift, and the game ends when everyone has a present.

The rules differ from group to group, so agree on them before the first gift is opened. Set them in the tracker below and print them out, and nobody can argue later.

First, decide how many times a gift can be stolen. Without a limit, one popular gift can go round the room all night. Wikipedia gives two steals as the common cap, after which the gift is frozen and its holder keeps it. Bustle's guide uses two as well. HuffPost reports that many groups allow three steals per gift in the whole game.

HuffPost and Bustle both describe a rule that a gift can be stolen only once in the same turn, which stops two people trading one gift back and forth.

A turn can run on for a while, so Bustle's version caps each one at three swaps, and suggests one swap per turn for a simpler game. In the tracker, once a turn uses up its steals, the next person to lose a gift has to unwrap one.

Player 1 had nothing to steal, so some groups let them swap once with anyone at the very end, as Wikipedia notes among the variations.

Last, decide on stealing straight back. It's a house rule the guides don't cover, but it's worth agreeing. If it's on, a player who has just lost a gift can't take it straight back from the person who took it.

It's the same game under different names. HuffPost found White Elephant the most widely used, with no strong regional ties. Yankee Swap is most common in New England, and Dirty Santa is popular in the South, where the game can involve more stealing and either nice or joke gifts.

The name comes from a story that the kings of Siam gave rare white elephants to courtiers they were displeased with, since the animals cost a fortune to keep. Wikipedia says there's no record that any king did this, and HuffPost quotes the historian Rita Ringis that Siamese monarchs didn't treat the elephants as burdens or give them away. In Thai culture white elephants are sacred and valuable. In English, though, a white elephant came to mean an extravagant, impractical gift that's hard to get rid of, which suits a pile of joke presents.