Suggested warm-ups
A ready-made opening fifteen minutes: bodies first, then focus, then agreement.
Pass the Clap · Zip Zap Zop · Sound Ball · Yes, Let's · Count to Twenty
Reference
Games and warm-ups
There are a great many lists of improv games and almost none of them say what the games are for. Every entry here has its own page with step-by-step instructions, coaching notes and — the part usually missing — what it is actually training.
40 games and exercises, grouped by what you would use them for. Names vary enormously between theatres, so common alternatives are noted on each page. Nothing here is proprietary; these are the shared folk tradition of the form.
Suggested sets
Hand-picked line-ups for common situations — each in the order you would actually run them.
Crowd favorites
The performance games audiences reliably love — the ones that built short form's reputation.
Freeze Tag · Party Quirks · World's Worst · Story Story Die · Genre Replay · Late for Work
Great for beginners
Low fear, no wrong answers, and everyone plays at once. Where a brand-new group should start.
Yes, Let's · Zip Zap Zop · Red Ball · One Word Story · World's Worst · Freeze Tag
Listening clinic
For the week the notes were all 'you're planning instead of hearing each other.'
Mind Meld · One Word Story · Three-Line Scenes · Story Story Die · Two-Headed Expert · Mirror
Scene surgery
Coach's drills that isolate one skill at a time — relationship, emotion, space, escalation.
Three-Line Scenes · Emotional Replay · Status Cards · Building the Room · Tag Run Drill · The Ding
Harold night
Openings and group-mind work for a team rehearsing long form.
Count to Twenty · Pattern Game · Invocation · Group Monologue · Tag Run Drill
Alone but practising
No group tonight? Run these six in a row — about forty minutes, and nobody has to watch.
Word Ladders · One Person, Two Chairs · Premise Reps · Emotional Chores · The Expert Minute · Justification Sprints
Warm-ups
Short exercises to get a group present, connected and out of their heads before anything else happens.
Zip Zap Zop
A circle warm-up in which a clap and a word are passed by direct eye contact, accelerating until it collapses.
Teaches: Focus and eye contact. It looks like a reaction game and is really a test of whether people are receiving before they send.
Pass the Clap
Two players clap in perfect unison, then the clap travels around the circle. Simultaneity matters more than speed.
Teaches: Shared timing. Groups that cannot clap together generally cannot edit together either.
Count to Twenty
The group counts to twenty aloud with no order and no plan. Two voices at once means starting again.
Teaches: Group mind, more directly than any other exercise. It is the fastest diagnostic available for whether a group is listening or waiting.
Mind Meld
Two players say a word simultaneously, then keep saying words suggested by both previous words until they land on the same one.
Teaches: Meeting in the middle rather than winning. Players who reach for the clever association never converge; players who say the obvious thing converge in two or three rounds.
Red Ball
Imaginary objects with names, weights and sizes are thrown around a circle, each one confirmed aloud on receipt.
Teaches: Object consistency and the habit of acknowledging an offer before acting on it.
Sound Ball
An imaginary ball is thrown with a sound attached; the catcher repeats the sound exactly, then throws with a new one.
Teaches: Committing to an uncalculated choice instantly, and reproducing a partner's offer accurately rather than approximately.
What Are You Doing?
One player mimes an activity while naming a completely different one, which the next player must then mime.
Teaches: Splitting attention between body and mouth, and abandoning your own idea the instant somebody hands you another.
Agreement and listening
Exercises that train the two foundations — accepting what you are given, and actually hearing it in the first place.
Yes, Let's
Anyone proposes an activity, the whole group shouts "yes, let's!" and immediately does it with their whole body.
Teaches: Wholehearted acceptance with the body rather than the mouth. The gap between saying yes and meaning it becomes visible immediately.
One Word Story
A group tells a single coherent story contributing one word each, with no pauses and no ungrammatical sentences.
Teaches: Surrendering authorship completely. Nobody can steer it, so everybody must accept the sentence they are in rather than the one they wanted.
Three-Line Scenes
Scenes exactly three lines long, run in rapid succession, to isolate the moment a scene becomes about something.
Teaches: That the second line decides the scene. Nothing demonstrates it faster than doing it twenty times consecutively.
Gibberish Translation
One player speaks only gibberish, a second translates, and a third responds normally.
Teaches: That meaning lives in tone and body rather than vocabulary, and it forces justification under pressure.
Mirror
Two players move in perfect unison with neither leading, so an observer cannot tell who initiates.
Teaches: Shared initiation and sustained physical attention. It is the clearest available demonstration of what supporting a partner actually feels like.
Scene work
Drills for the craft itself: relationship, status, object work, heightening and the discipline of the second line.
Status Cards
Players wear an unseen playing card on their forehead and are treated by everyone else according to its value.
Teaches: Status as behaviour rather than rank, and how rapidly and accurately people read it when nobody says anything.
Emotional Replay
The same scene, with identical dialogue, replayed under different dominant emotions.
Teaches: That emotional reality rather than content determines what a scene is about. Also cures performers who believe characterisation means new words.
Building the Room
A single performer establishes an entire room through object work alone, with no dialogue, and the group afterwards describes what they saw.
Teaches: Object consistency and spatial discipline. The debrief is where the learning happens, because it shows precisely where belief broke.
The Ding
A coach rings a bell on any weak, hedged or evasive line, and the player must instantly replace it.
Teaches: That there is always another option, and that a first instinct is not sacred.
Tag Run Drill
A pattern is established in a two-person scene, then tagged repeatedly to produce eight or more escalating instances of the same idea.
Teaches: Heightening the same idea rather than adding new ones, plus the physical mechanics of tagging cleanly.
Short-form games
Performance games with rules, suitable for a stage and an audience.
Freeze Tag
Anyone may freeze a scene, replace a player in their exact position, and justify that position with an entirely new scene.
Teaches: Justification, and reading meaning into shape. The oldest and most widely played improv game there is.
Questions Only
A scene in which every single line must be a question. Anything else eliminates the player.
Teaches: That a question can carry information if it is specific enough — the difference between "what?" and "why did you bring your mother's ashes to my wedding?"
Party Quirks
A host must guess the audience-supplied peculiarity of each guest arriving at their party.
Teaches: Playing an idea through behaviour, and giving a partner enough information to succeed with.
Alphabet Game
A scene in which successive lines begin with successive letters of the alphabet.
Teaches: Working under an arbitrary constraint while still playing a genuine scene.
World's Worst
Given a category, players step forward one at a time to deliver the worst conceivable example in a single beat.
Teaches: Economy and the courage to step out without an idea, which is the whole skill it is really training.
Sit, Stand, Lie Down
Three players perform a scene in which one must always be sitting, one standing and one lying down.
Teaches: Physical awareness and justification under a mechanical constraint.
Story Story Die
A line of players tells one story, each speaking only while pointed at, and eliminated for hesitating or repeating.
Teaches: Continuous listening. It is impossible to survive while planning, because you never know when the point is coming.
Two-Headed Expert
Two players share a single character, speaking one word each, while a third interviews them about their field of expertise.
Teaches: Surrendering control of a sentence, and matching a partner's rhythm and syntax precisely.
Genre Replay
A scene is played once straight, then replayed in different genres called out by the host or audience.
Teaches: Structural memory and stylistic range, and it demonstrates vividly that content and treatment are separable.
Late for Work
A player who left the room must discover, from mimed clues, the three reasons the audience decided they were late.
Teaches: Committed guessing, and generous clue-giving under pressure.
Group and opening games
Whole-cast forms used to open a long-form piece or to build shared attention.
Pattern Game
From one suggestion, the group speaks free associations aloud, building chains of words and images with no scenes.
Teaches: Thematic thinking and shared attention. It generates the pool of material the rest of a Harold is built from.
Invocation
The group explores a single word in escalating stages, from third-person description through to speaking as the thing itself.
Teaches: Depth rather than breadth, and generating emotional rather than literal material from a suggestion.
Group Monologue
The whole group speaks as a single first-person narrator, one sentence at a time, telling one continuous account.
Teaches: A shared voice and a shared point of view. It exposes immediately whether a group is listening or competing.
Solo practice
Exercises for one person — the car, the kitchen, the walk to the shop. Nothing here replaces a room full of people, but these keep the reflexes warm between classes and give the self-conscious a private place to start.
Word Ladders
A free-association drill you can do anywhere: chain single words aloud, then practise jumping the middle step out.
Teaches: Trusting the first thought. The chain exposes how often you veto perfectly good offers from your own head before they reach your mouth.
One Person, Two Chairs
Play both sides of a two-person scene, physically switching chairs on every line, until two distinct people exist.
Teaches: Point of view. Because you are both people, the only way to keep the scene alive is to give each one an actual position — which is precisely the skill in a real scene.
Premise Reps
Ten generated premises, ten first lines, out loud, no do-overs — reps for the exact moment beginners fear most.
Teaches: That first lines are cheap. Producing ten mediocre openings on a timer does more than composing one perfect opening ever will — scenes die from hesitation, not from ordinary starts.
Emotional Chores
Do a real household task while cycling through assigned emotions on a timer — range practice disguised as dishes.
Teaches: That emotion lives in the body and the objects, not in the face. Audiences read grief from how a cup is set down long before they read it from an expression.
The Expert Minute
Sixty seconds as the world's leading authority on the nearest object, delivered with total confidence.
Teaches: Confident invention. The audience never checks facts; they check conviction. This drill separates knowing from committing — improv only requires the second.
Justification Sprints
Yoke two unrelated things together and explain, in three sentences, why they obviously belong together.
Teaches: Justification — the muscle that turns mistakes into gifts. Scenes wobble when something unplanned happens; this trains the reflex that greets the unplanned as inevitable.
The Character Commute
Walk a real errand carrying one changed physical choice — a new walk, lead, or tempo — and let it suggest a person.
Teaches: That character is built from behaviour outward, not biography inward. One committed physical choice generates opinions, history and voice on its own.
Gibberish Radio
Host a radio show entirely in gibberish — alone in the car is the traditional venue — until sound and meaning separate.
Teaches: That most of communication is melody, status and intention. Freeing the mouth from vocabulary trains commitment to sound, which reads on stage as confidence.
Narrate the Walk
A noticing drill: walk and quietly narrate only what is actually there, in increasingly specific passes.
Teaches: Specificity as a habit. Scenes starve on generic detail ('a store', 'some guy'); a stocked memory of real particulars is what object work and base reality draw on later.
Thank You, Brain
Say your brain's first offer out loud, accept it verbatim, and add one sentence — yes-and, practised on yourself.
Teaches: Self-agreement. Most blocking happens before your partner ever hears you — this drill catches the internal veto in the act and overrules it.
Running these well. Pick the exercise for the thing your group is failing at, not the one everybody enjoys. Say what it trains before you start, and debrief afterwards — an exercise nobody understood the purpose of is a game, and a game is not practice. And stop while it is still going well, which is the same advice as chapter eight.
Run it from your phone
These games, plus generators and session plans.
The free companion app has every game here, scene and suggestion generators for when the room goes blank, and rehearsal plans you can build and save. It installs to your phone and works offline.
Reference
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