2025 Thanksgiving Football Pool Printable ~ Game-watching fun for the whole family!

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2025 Version is Live!

Our printable Thanksgiving football game will make watching football enjoyable for the whole family. Keep reading for our super fun 2025 Thanksgiving football pool printable game – it’s free, too.

by Ed

Regular visitors will likely know that we annually publish our Super Bowl party game. It is an easy activity to help non-fans stay more engaged during the Big Game and you can tweak it with a prize pool, playing for chores or any other option.

We’ve heard from many readers that they look forward to it every year and love the added layer of fun it has provided to their Super Bowl watching.

Which got me thinking: What other football-watching activity brings together fans and non-fans for many hours of NFL action? When else might a football party game make things more exciting?

THANKSGIVING!

Sorry to be so slow on the uptake, American readers. Our Canadian Turkey Day takes place in early October, but I really should know better.

On Thanksgiving Thursday, we often have the early game on in our office and I know only about half the people care about it.

Then I come home and put the afternoon game on and, again, very few others in my household care.

The need for a Thanksgiving football party game to pump this up was staring me right in the face.

So, after far too long, we present: Our Annual Thanksgiving Football Pool Printable Game!

Similar to the Super Bowl Version, I am still going to provide versions of this game that work for people who can have others over and for those who can’t.

The tools we found are so great! – I will keep posting the digital version too in future seasons because it will allow football fans who are spread out geographically to still play our goofy little game!

In addition, since Thanksgiving games span the whole day, I have generated pull tabs that you can use for each game separately, or all three games, if your house is hardcore and wants approximately 10 straight hours of NFL to be Thankful for.

Pages 1-2 are 12:30 game tickets
Pages 3-4 are the 4:30 game tickets and
Pages 5-6 are for the late, 8:20 game.

Gather the Fans… (And the non-Fans) and get playing.

We’ve made this game with both groups in mind– and it works!

The consensus is it’s genuinely fun (even if you find football a bit ~meh~). And football fans will enjoy it, too.

It’s a pretty tall order, but this party game combines the best elements of football (big plays, scoring – team or individual) with other quirky stuff (things announcers say, what people in the room are doing or talking about) so that virtually the whole Thanksgiving Day will give you something to cheer for (or gamble on).

What follows is our Thanksgiving Football Pool Printable game (and it doesn’t involve a matrix of gambling squares or any real football knowledge at all).

Why is this such a fun Thanksgiving Football Party Game for everyone?

1) Well, first off you don’t have to know anything about football.

You pull tickets blindly and then roll with what you get. The ultimate winner is also chosen randomly.

2) You don’t have to wait until the game or quarter ends for things to cheer for.

If you have a few tickets, there’s a good chance that you’ll be watching for an event to happen on every single play.

3) You can play the game with or without a gambling component.

The first time we played, party-goers each chipped in $10. The winner took home $60.

A non-gambling alternative would be to have a prize of some sort for the winner.

My buddy and universally acknowledged game inventor Andy “sells” the individual tickets, allowing people to buy as many or as few as they like until they are all sold. You could still win it all by only buying one. And you don’t get to pick which ones you buy – you again have to draw blindly.

4) Even if the score gets out of hand (as it often does when Detroit plays on Thanksgiving – hey, this comment is still accurate now that Detroit is awesome), this little game still gives you a reason to watch.

5) Football really is better when you have something to cheer for – this game gives you that.

We played it at a party a couple of years back and Robin and several other football-neutral folks enjoyed the game more than they ever had before.

How to use our Thanksgiving Football Pool Printable:

1. Print the party game pages for the Thanksgiving games you are watching (Pages 1-2 are 12:30 game tickets, Pages 3-4 are the 4:30 game tickets and Pages 5-6 are for the late, 8:20 game). The printable is just below these instructions.

2. Cut out the tickets and fold them in half. Place in a bowl. Come up with a prize of some sort. Money is popular but so boring. Play for “Get out of Thanksgiving Clean-up duty” if no one has any ideas.

3. Figure out how many tickets each person at your Thanksgiving party can draw.

Each game has 32 tickets so if you’ve got a group of 8 people, each person can draw 4 tickets.
Or you can put all 96 tickets into the bowl and draw till you run out. This might mean some people might end up with no tickets in some games and lots in others, so do whatever you think will work for your crowd.

4. Everyone draws and secretly reads their own tickets.

5. Once the game starts, players watch in hopes that the events on their tickets take place.

Whenever one of the events on your ticket happens, you write your name on the back and put it in the bowl. If, for instance, Dak Prescott throws a TD pass, then anyone holding that ticket writes their name on the back and places the ticket back into the bowl…and so on.

6. Some tickets have events on them that rely on people in the room saying or doing something.

It should go without saying that you can’t be the person to say, “I hate Dallas” if you have a ticket that says <Someone complains about Dallas>. The weird stuff must happen organically. It’s only fair and it is actually much more fun when it does happen.

7. After the game(s), a ticket is drawn from the bowl to determine a winner, and that person takes home the prize.

How to Virtually Play Our Thanksgiving Football Party Game (Digital Version):

Have the Remote Thanksgiving Party Coordinator use the link options below to generate random lists for all guests.
- I have it defaulting to 7, but you can scroll to the bottom and adjust the number of ‘Groups’ to however many people want to play. You can also edit the lists if you want everyone to get the same number of chances or add in your own.
- All Three Games Link
- 12:30 Game only
- 4:30 Game only
- 8:20 Game only
You can then use the share buttons to send out the lists publicly or simply copy and paste each Grouping of digital pull tickets into an email or text and send them out to your virtual Thanksgiving guests.
As events happen, people can text/tweet/email/DM the Party Coordinator their ticket, and that event gets manually added to a list in this Random Drawer (your digital ‘Fishbowl’).
At the end of the game, the Party host/Coordinator can do the Random Draw and announce the winner or screen-share and draw so everyone can watch the digital excitement live.

Give it a shot – even if it is just you and the family sitting around. Pull some tickets and play for “No Chores” or “Sleep In” or whatever.

With how much football that is played over Thanksgiving, it really seems a shame if guests find it boring. This game will fix that.

Here it is!