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Picking Dirty Santa as the event type sets the group up to hand out a pick order rather than match everybody with a person to buy for.
One limit, shown to everybody on every page. Dirty Santa turns sour fastest when one gift is worth stealing and the rest are not.
Type the names or paste a list. Whoever is running it can play or sit out, and the order is drawn around whoever is actually in.
Each person opens a link of their own and finds the number they drew, and nothing about anybody else. Sending those by email is free.
A Dirty Santa needs exactly one thing settled in advance - who picks when. The rest is an argument you are supposed to have at the party, and this is deliberately plain about which is which.
One through however many of you there are, at random, with each person shown only the number they drew. No numbers in a bowl, no torn-up napkins, no suspicion that whoever wrote them went first on purpose.
How many times a gift can be stolen before it is frozen, whether you can steal back immediately, whether number one gets the last swap of the night. Every family plays these differently and we do not enforce any of them, so say yours out loud before the first gift is unwrapped.
This is where Dirty Santa parts company with a gag-gift White Elephant - the whole game rests on the gifts being worth taking off somebody. One clear spending limit on every page is what keeps them in the same league.
People drop out of these constantly. Add or remove somebody and the order is drawn again, so you never arrive with a number seventeen and sixteen people.
A link is the whole thing. Relatives who will not install anything can still open theirs, and anybody who loses it can have it emailed back.
Everybody brings one wrapped gift and draws a number. Number one opens something from the pile. From there each person in turn either opens a new gift or steals one already opened, and whoever is stolen from goes again. Most groups cap a gift at three steals and then freeze it, and many let number one swap with anybody at the very end, since they never got a turn with the pile full. Agree yours before you start - that is the argument, not the game.
The same game with a different name and a different mood. Dirty Santa is what it is called across much of the South, and the gifts are usually things people genuinely want, which is what makes stealing worth doing. A White Elephant leans toward gag gifts and the funniest thing in the pile. Either way the app does the same job: it draws the order and leaves the game to you.
No, and it will not pretend to. The generator draws the order, then the game is played in the room in front of everybody, which is a better record than a phone. If you want steal counts tracked live, that is not something we do today and we would rather say so now than have you find out halfway through.
It works from two upward but it comes alive from about six, when enough gifts are open that stealing means something. There is no upper limit - the largest exchange run on Secret Santa Hat is past two hundred and eighty people.
Across every exchange run here the median limit is a little under thirty dollars. Whatever you land on, put it in the app so it shows on every page instead of living in one text message nobody can find on the night.
Yes. Unlimited groups and participants, the pick order, the guest list, the spending limit and email invites cost nothing and need no account. Text message and WhatsApp invites are an optional paid upgrade.