Pictionary – Everyone knows what this game is.  The only trouble with doing it with vocab is that it’s pretty darn difficult to draw vocab.  So I modified the rules a little bit.
Each team starts with a list of “drawable” words.  When a member of team A goes to draw the word, his team only gets 2 guesses at the word.  This makes it so team A can’t just read off the whole list.  Repeat for team B.  You do not necessarily have to draw the definition of the word.  You could use a word like bombastic and draw a bomb, or a word like truncate, and draw an elephant or tree trunk.  Here is a quick list of drawable words that I came up with.

The Flyswatter Game – Showdown Style – This is the same vocabulary game you play in your high-school Spanish or French class.  On a dry erase or blackboard, write up a list of many words in a random order, in any orientation – it can get crazy if you write words backwards.  If you do not have access to a blackboard, write up the words on index cards and tape them up to a wall.  Anyways, a member of each team will step up to the line.  The judge/moderator will read a definition, and the individual who identifies the word first wins the round.  It’s called the flyswatter game because sometimes the individuals will have a flyswatter, and whoever “swats” the correct word first wins.  You can also erase the word, or rip off the index card – whatever works for you.  The team with the most points wins the event.  You may play full-contact flyswatter game if you wish, but the milder version has a rule of no bodily contact.

Sentence Completion Challenge – not as boring as it sounds, and truly a team event.  Each team gets 10-15 minutes to write up to 10 of their own sentence completion questions which will then be completed by the opposing team.  The sentence completion questions must be fair (determined by the judge).  “Fair” means that only one answer choice is correct and also that the answer choice must actually fit in the sentence.  Usually the sentence completion questions fit this style:

Anish loves the soccer player Zidane because Zidane is __________; Zidane once headbutted a guy in the chest after hostile words were exchanged.

1. happy
2. sad
3. belligerent
4. nice
5. funny

These sentence comp questions emphasize vocabulary.  This game is fun because each team gets to be creative.  To make the questions more difficult for the other team, more difficult vocabulary is necessary – a sentence-completion version of stump the chump.  Other tricks to make it more difficult are to throw in superfluous words or play around with the triggers/contextual clues.