What's a Christmas grab bag?
Grab bag is a really common thing, especially for kids and in school ... at least it was back a year or two ago when I was a wee one. Everyone participating contributes a gift - usually there's a price limit, like $10 - and brings it to class, or to the holiday party. All the wrapped gifts go in a big bag, or on a big table ... and then in some order (usually determined by pulling numbers from a hat), each person chooses a package and opens it ... and the gift is theirs to keep.
The Yankee swap (it has many other names, most of them racist or stereotyped ... in my family we call it a Chinese auction) is a way more fun, wild, crazy variation of that that goes on much longer, leads to way more laughs, and hopefully ends up with a higher average satisfaction level with the gifts each person ends up with.
In a traditional grab bag, there's an advantage to being first ... you get your choice from all the packages. But since you don't know what's in any of them, it doesn't necessarily help you end up with a gift you like. In the Yankee swap, there's advantage to having a later number, because more of the gifts have been opened by the time you get your turn, so you can steal whichever one you like the best.
The way we play it in my family though, if someone steals your gift, you can steal any
other gift (you can't steal back the one stolen from you, obviously) or open one of the unopened packages. Each turn / round ends when someone opens a new gift from the center, and the game ends when the last gift gets opened. The stealing can go on for quite a while for a given turn, and can be quite fun and silly.
So having the
last turn isn't necessarily best ... you might steal the gift you want to end up with, and later in the round, someone else will steal it from
you ... and then you cannot steal it back.
Both games tend to lead to trades happening after the game ends, but if you ended up with something undesirable, you are out of luck.
