How White Elephant Actually Works (And Why the Office Version Falls Apart)

Twenty two wrapped boxes are crowded at one end of the conference room table and a bowl of folded paper numbers sits at the other. You are running the white elephant this year, and before the second turn is over somebody whose gift has just been taken will ask whether they can take it straight back. Whatever you answer becomes the rule for the rest of the evening.

You have been in the version where every person unwraps a box and keeps what is inside. A host there took the stealing out to keep things pleasant, and what was left was a raffle with wrapping paper on it. You have also been in the version that will not end, where one bottle keeps moving because nobody set a limit on how often a single gift can change hands. The exchange is a stealing game with a stop rule, and each of those two evenings was missing one of them.

So two things get set before anyone arrives. The first is the price cap, the most any one gift may cost, which goes on the invitation. The second is the freeze, the number of steals after which a gift stops moving. Three is the usual freeze, and the seven lines below are written with it.

The rules, read aloud before anyone draws

1. Bring one wrapped gift that cost no more than the cap and put it on the table. Keep to yourself which one you brought.
2. Draw a number from the bowl. Play starts at number one and moves up through the numbers in order.
3. On your turn, unwrap a gift from the table or take an opened gift from the person holding it. If the table is empty and every opened gift is frozen when your turn arrives, your turn ends and play moves on.
4. If someone takes your gift, take your turn straight away: unwrap a gift or take a different opened one. When your turn ends, play goes back to the lowest number that has yet to play.
5. You cannot take back a gift on the turn it was taken from you. At least one other turn has to be played first.
6. The steal count belongs to the gift and follows it from hand to hand. Unwrapping a gift is never a steal. Once a gift has been taken three times it is frozen: it stays with whoever is holding it and it is out of the game.
7. When every number has played, number one may swap once with anyone holding an unfrozen gift. That swap ends the game, and the person swapped with takes no turn.

Rule four is what keeps the room moving without a host calling every turn, since a steal hands the next turn to the person who just lost a gift. Rule seven pays back number one, who unwraps with an empty table and nothing opened in the room to take, while the last number to play chooses with every gift in view. The freeze is a convention and you can move it: a higher number keeps the best gift in play longer and a lower one settles things sooner. The same exchange goes by Yankee swap and by dirty Santa on other invitations.

Where the name comes from

The story goes that a king gave a sacred white elephant to a courtier he wanted to ruin. A gift from the king could not be refused. A sacred animal could not be put to work. And an elephant eats every day, whoever owns it. A white elephant is a gift that costs the person who receives it, and the exchange takes its name from what you are supposed to bring, which is the thing in your house you would be glad to hand to somebody else.

Setting the price cap

Those rules are the exchange as it is commonly played. The price cap is the number you choose, and it decides whether rule three ever gets used, because a player takes an opened gift only when they want it more than an unopened box. Set the cap low enough and nothing on the table is worth crossing the room for, so every turn is an unwrapping and the sheet of rules sits there unused.

Pick the figure this way: the most that the lowest paid person in the room can spend without thinking about it, and then check that the figure still buys something somebody here would be sorry to lose. Twenty five dollars is a working assumption to replace with your own. An office white elephant is where this goes wrong most often, because the paychecks around the table are furthest apart there and nobody says a number out loud.

Put the cap on the invitation with three more words: spend the cap. A room where half the gifts came in at the cap and half came in at a third of it sends every steal to the same few boxes, and the rest of the table watches its own gift sit untouched all evening.

Say on the same invitation which kind of gift the room is bringing, joke gifts or gifts people want to keep. Either version gives a player a reason to take something off somebody. A room that gets both leaves half its gifts unstealable, since a joke gift among good bottles is opened once and set down for the night.

Someone will arrive with a rule from another room: two gifts opened at once, a forfeit attached to a steal, swap backs allowed. Say that tonight runs on the seven lines and that any of those can come back next year. A rule added after the numbers are in the bowl changes the game for everyone who has already taken a turn under the old one.

Take a number yourself. Once they are drawn you are a player like everyone else, and the gift you wrapped this morning can be taken off you.