Here's a charades game I've played successfully before. I usually play it as a team speed game. Students must guess the action using the verb tense being practiced.
Before we start the game proper, I usually have a volunteer come to the front and pick a prompt to act out. The rest of the students can raise their hands to guess and the winner gets to come up next. I go through a few rounds like this so the students can become familiar with both the game and the words.
When I'm satisfied everyone understands, I put 20 seconds or so on a countdown timer (like online-stopwatch.com) and have a volunteer from the first team come up. That student then has 20 seconds to get his/her team to guess as many prompts as possible. When the first team is finished, all of the prompts go back into the pile and the next team has a go. This means that there's lots of repetition to help memorization, and also that the students guess more quickly in the second round so that they get higher scores. This generally makes them feel pretty good.
Teams get one point for each past tense verb correctly guessed within the the allotted time. The team whose turn it is can just call out answers, but any team (whether guessing or not) can lose points for being too loud/unruly.
