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Social hobbies
Hobbies built around other people: team sports, choirs, board games, quizzes, volunteering and clubs. Each guide explains how to find a local group, what a first session is like and how to settle in as a newcomer.
Showing 60 of 142 hobbies
Football
Football is the team game of passing, controlling and shooting a ball, learned through kickabouts, five-a-side, walking football and local clubs.
Open guide →Singing
Singing is using your own voice to perform songs, learning breath support, pitch and tone, usually in a choir, a group class or one-to-one lessons.
Open guide →Pickleball
Pickleball is a racket sport for two or four players, played on a badminton-sized court with a solid paddle and a perforated plastic ball that is hit underhand.
Open guide →Board Games
Board games are tabletop games for two or more players, from party and family titles to co-operative and strategy games, played at home, in cafes and at clubs.
Open guide →Magic Tricks
Magic is learning and performing tricks such as card, coin and rope effects that surprise people using sleight of hand, misdirection and good presentation.
Open guide →Volunteering
Volunteering is giving regular unpaid time to a charity, community group or public service, from charity shops and food banks to conservation days and befriending.
Open guide →Improv Theatre
Improv theatre is making up scenes and stories on the spot with other performers, using games and suggestions from the audience or the group.
Open guide →Amateur Dramatics
Amateur dramatics is joining a local society to rehearse and perform plays, musicals and pantomimes, on stage or behind the scenes, for the love of it.
Open guide →Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons is a tabletop roleplaying game in which a Dungeon Master narrates a world, players act as characters and dice decide the outcomes.
Open guide →Trivia
Trivia is the hobby of building general knowledge and testing it against others, mostly through weekly pub quizzes, quiz leagues and quiz apps.
Open guide →Stand-up Comedy
Stand-up comedy is writing and performing short sets of jokes and stories to a live audience, usually starting with five-minute spots at open mic nights.
Open guide →Pen Pals
Pen pals means swapping handwritten letters and postcards with someone you may never meet, often abroad, to share everyday life, interests or a language.
Open guide →Go
Placing black and white stones on a grid to surround territory and capture groups, in one of the world's oldest strategy games.
Open guide →Shogi
Playing shogi, Japanese chess, on a 9x9 board where captured pieces can be dropped back into play as your own, from first moves to simple checkmate problems.
Open guide →Xiangqi
Playing xiangqi, Chinese chess, on a 9x10 board with a river and palaces, learning how cannons, horses and chariots combine to trap the general.
Open guide →Backgammon
Backgammon is a two-player board game where you roll dice to race 15 checkers around the board and bear them off before your opponent, hitting blots along the way.
Open guide →Checkers
Two-player board game on an eight-by-eight board where you move pieces diagonally, jump to capture and crown kings, known in the UK as draughts.
Open guide →Mahjong
Learning the four-player tile game from drawing and discarding to completing a hand of sets and a pair, in Hong Kong, Riichi or American styles.
Open guide →Dominoes
Matching tiles by their spots in games like block, draw, fives and threes, played at home, in pubs or as a partner game.
Open guide →Cribbage
A two-to-four player card game where you score points for fifteens, pairs and runs and race round a peg board to 121.
Open guide →Bridge
Contract bridge, a four-player partnership card game of bidding, then playing out tricks, learned through lessons, minibridge or friendly club evenings.
Open guide →Poker
Learning Texas hold'em, the most common poker game: hand rankings, betting rounds and position, played for fun or tiny stakes with friends or at a club.
Open guide →Rummy
Playing rummy with a standard pack of cards: drawing and discarding to form sets and runs, from a casual family game to two-player gin rummy.
Open guide →Canasta
Rummy-family card game played with two packs and jokers in which you collect and lay down sets of matching cards, aiming for a seven-card canasta.
Open guide →Solitaire
Solitaire, called patience in the UK, is a single-player card game in which you sort a shuffled deck into ordered piles, with Klondike, FreeCell and Spider the best known.
Open guide →Sudoku
Solving sudoku number puzzles on a 9x9 grid by logic alone, from easy newspaper puzzles to harder ones using pencil marks, pairs and X-wings.
Open guide →Kakuro
Kakuro is a number puzzle where you fill a grid with digits 1–9 so each run adds up to its clue and no digit repeats in a run, like a crossword made of sums.
Open guide →Crosswords
Crosswords are word puzzles where you fill a grid from clues, from quick definition puzzles to cryptics with wordplay, solved alone, in pairs or at the pub.
Open guide →Cryptic Crosswords
Cryptic crosswords are word puzzles where each clue hides a definition and a piece of wordplay, such as an anagram, so you solve them by decoding.
Open guide →Word Searches
Word searches are puzzles in which you hunt for hidden words in a grid of letters, reading across, down and diagonally, either alone, in books or with friends.
Open guide →Logic Puzzles
Logic puzzles such as sudoku, logic grids and nonograms are solved by deduction alone, and you can enjoy them in groups, clubs, magazines and solving contests.
Open guide →Escape Rooms
Escape rooms are team puzzle games where you are locked in a themed room and have about an hour to find clues, solve puzzles and unlock the way out.
Open guide →Rubik's Cube Solving
Solving the Rubik's Cube means restoring a scrambled 3x3 cube to six solid faces, using a beginner layer-by-layer method and later faster speedcubing methods.
Open guide →Speedcubing
Speedcubing is solving the Rubik's Cube and similar twisty puzzles as fast as possible, using memorised methods, finger tricks and timed practice.
Open guide →Competitive Puzzling
Competitive puzzling is racing the clock to complete jigsaws, usually 500-piece puzzles, alone, in pairs or in teams, at organised events and online.
Open guide →Quiz Bowls
Quiz bowl is a fast, buzzer-style team quiz where players interrupt long, escalating questions to score points, played mainly in universities, schools and online.
Open guide →Fantasy Sports
Fantasy sports means picking a squad of real players within a budget and scoring points from their actual matches, with Fantasy Premier League a popular UK game.
Open guide →Tabletop Wargaming
Tabletop wargaming is playing strategy battles with painted miniatures, dice and a tape measure on a table, either in fantasy, sci-fi or historical settings.
Open guide →Miniature Wargaming
Playing tabletop battles with small painted figures, tape measures and dice, from building and painting a first squad to learning a ruleset at a club.
Open guide →Warhammer
Warhammer is a hobby of building, painting and playing tabletop wargames with plastic miniature armies, in sci-fi and fantasy settings including Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar.
Open guide →Trading Card Games
Trading card games like Pokémon, Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! have you build a deck from collectible cards and play head-to-head, usually at a local game shop or club.
Open guide →Magic The Gathering
Magic: The Gathering is a strategy card game where you build a deck, spend mana on creatures and spells, and try to reduce your opponent's life total to zero.
Open guide →Pokemon TCG
The Pokemon Trading Card Game is a two-player card game of building a 60-card deck, battling with Pokemon and energy, and playing at local leagues and tournaments.
Open guide →Yu-Gi-Oh
Playing the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game: building a 40-card deck of monsters, spells and traps, and duelling friends or at a local card shop.
Open guide →Roleplaying Games
Tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons have a group tell a story together: players control characters, a game master runs the world and dice decide risky moments.
Open guide →Live Action Roleplay
Live action roleplay (larp) has you dress as a character and act out a shared story in person at a staged event, from woodland fantasy battles to indoor drama.
Open guide →Murder Mystery Games
Murder mystery games have guests play suspects at a dinner or party, using clue cards and questions to find who committed a fictional crime, from boxed kits to staged events.
Open guide →Social Deduction Games
Social deduction games such as Werewolf, The Resistance and Blood on the Clocktower give players secret roles, then use discussion and voting to uncover hidden traitors.
Open guide →Chess Boxing
Hybrid sport that alternates rounds of boxing and chess, requiring a calm head after hard exercise, usually trained at a boxing gym and a chess club.
Open guide →Billiards
English billiards is a cue game on a full-size table with three balls, scored by pots, cannons and in-offs, and played in snooker clubs and halls.
Open guide →Pool
Playing cue sports on a pub or club pool table: potting balls, controlling the white and learning 8-ball rules, from chalking a cue to winning a frame.
Open guide →Snooker
Playing snooker on a full-size table: potting 15 reds alternating with colours, learning cue action, cue-ball control and your first frames at a local club.
Open guide →Darts
Throwing darts at a numbered board to score down from 501, learned in pub leagues, at home or in a club.
Open guide →Bowling
Rolling a heavy ball down a lane to knock over ten pins, with a simple scoring system and the option to join leagues once you have the basics.
Open guide →Ten-Pin Bowling
Ten-pin bowling is rolling a heavy ball down a lane to knock over ten pins, scored over ten frames, played casually at a bowling centre or in a league.
Open guide →Bocce
Italian-style ball game where teams roll or lob heavy balls to land closest to a small target ball, played on lawns, gravel or a purpose-built court.
Open guide →Petanque
Tossing steel boules to land nearest a small wooden jack on gravel, played in teams of one to three at parks, pubs and clubs.
Open guide →Croquet
Hitting wooden balls through hoops on a lawn with a mallet, in the tactical club game or the faster golf croquet.
Open guide →Shuffleboard
Shuffleboard is a sliding game where you push weighted discs or pucks along a long court or waxed table towards scoring zones, and your opponent tries to knock you off.
Open guide →Horseshoes
Horseshoes is a throwing game where you pitch heavy metal horseshoes at a stake, scoring for ringers around it and shoes closest to it, in gardens, pubs and clubs.
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