A couple of standby games for us have been Pluck a Goose and Hi-Lo.In Pluck a Goose, you have to sacrifice a full body goose decoy. I saw one on sale last week for $17.00 and you can reuse the thing time after time.
You drill 150 holes in the back, and then insert rolled up theater tickets into the holes. Brfore you roll them up, you mark 50 ticket as $10, 50 as $ 5, and 50 free. Do it so you cant see the makings until you "pluck" a ticket and open it up.
This mix will return $750, so pick a prize worth about 1/2 that; say a Nova or 870 shotgun. Have the person running the game ring a bell or blow a whistle every time somebody gets a "Free" ticket. This usually sells out even at smaller events
Hi-Lo is a card game. We usually use a smaller prize like a 22 rifle. It costs $5 to play, and the actual game is simple. Turn over the first card and then the player has to guess whether the next one is Higher or Lower. guess wrong and you lose; guess right and you keep going. The object of the game is to quit without losing after making the longest streak of right guesses.
We make a board for this using a foam poster board (paper ones work, too) and blank Name tags. Stick three or four rows of tags in a matrix on the board and place each card on a tag as you deal it, so everybody can see how the player is doing. Once they get past whoever WAS in the lead, beofr eevery card they have to decie whether to go on or stop, if they stop, have them write their name or their bidder number on that name tag, and the next player has to beat THAT number. It usually takes something like 15-20 right to win, but I have seen deals that went Ace, deuce, Ace, deuce and so on (no real decisions) for quite a while.
This works best when you have a crowd of fairly young guys playing "against" their buddies. The actual prize seems to be less important that beating their friends, and if you can get a smart alec dealer who will tease them as they play ("you have a King and you're guessing 'Low'???? There are 5 cards higher, you know") that can make it even more fun.
Remember, if you prize costs $150, you will have to play 30 times just to break even, so if you have a small crowd, or one that doesn't really like to take risks they have a part in, this might not be for you.
Other staples are pretty simple. Sell a deck of cards (52 to 54 chances) on a gun, with the cost set to meet whatever goal you may have for that item.
One variation on this is to sell all but ONE of the cards, and have a "last man standing" raffle, by having the first 50 cards drawn as loser. With one card left, Auction the held back card (for some reason this is always the Ace of Spades arouond here) as the first Auction item and then draw with the first card out the "last loser".
You can also do the same thing, sort of, by drawing until there are five cards left, getting those five players right up front and then asking each of them if they would like to auction their remaining cards, with half the money going to them and half going to the ducks. I have never seen anybody takiing the auction, but I could see it happening.
We also sell chances on "pick of the litter"; 100 chance at $10 each and the winner can take any item from the live auction (ususally the Guns and other "big ticket" items are excluded). Another similar thing is selling duck/goose bands for an item (again usually 100 @ $10) such as a Redlin print or something similar).