Hello, all. The comic was posted a bit late last night. The comics are normally posted by the server automatically at midnight. However, I apparently typo’d when I last edited the queue, and I’m on vacation away from the net so davean had to fix it manually. My bad.
Moving on:
I’ve solved Ghost. I’m not the first person to do this, according to Wikipedia, but I think I’m the first to solve it on an airplane. The result: using the wordlist that ships with Ubuntu, it’s a win for the first player, but only if he plays H, J, M, or Z. The other letters are all wins for the second player (I hear if you use the Scrabble wordlist, it’s always a win for the second player).
Ghost is a word game that my brother and I learned as kids from the show Ghostwriter. It’s unusual in that it’s the only nontrivial, non-physical game I know how to play without any game pieces, paper, or anything else — all you need is communication (I never got the hang of blindfold chess — somehow the board always ends up with the wrong number of squares and I find mysef with three bishops). We’d play Ghost, whispering letters back and forth, when we had to sit quietly at formal events.
To play Ghost, you alternate saying letters. The first person to either (a) spell a word, or (b) create a string that cannot be the start of a word, loses. So you alternate building a word, and you have to always be working toward a word, but you can’t be the one to end it. Sample games, with players one and two alternating letters:
G-A-M-E — Player 1 loses by spelling “Game”
A-B-S-O-R-B — Player 2 loses by spelling “ABSORB”
B-Z-“Challenge” — Player 1, seeing “Z”, says “Challenge.” meaning “I think you’re not building toward a word. Name a word that starts with ‘BZ’ and prove you’re not just making stuff up.” Player 2 can’t, and loses. If he could, he’d win.
Note: We don’t count proper nouns or words under three letters.
I’ve often thought about how easy it would be to solve Ghost. We already knew a few simple winning plays — if the first player plays L, you can reply with another L, forcing them to spell “LLAMA”. On a plane trip with my family this week I decided to work out the full solution. I only had an hour or two of battery life left, and I’m still new to Python, so it was a race against the clock. It’s not too bad a problem in itself, but I wanted an optimal solution with only a few things to memorize, which meant pruning the tree carefully. My battery meter read “0% charge” as I scribbled the winning wordlist onto a sheet of paper.
Here are the words you can spell towards to force a win:
First player:
[hazard, haze, hazily, hazy, heterosexual, hiatus, hock, huckster, hybrid]
[jazz, jest, jilt, jowl, just]
[maverick, meow, mizzen, mnemonic, mozzarella, muzzle, muzzling, myth]
[zaniness, zany, zenith, zigzag, zombie, zucchini, zwieback, zygote]
Second player responses:
a :: [aorta]
b :: [black, blemish, blimp, bloat, blubber]
c :: [craft, crepe, crept, crick, crozier, crucial, cry]
d :: [dwarf, dwarves, dweeb, dwindle, dwindling]
e :: [ewe]
f :: [fjord]
g :: [ghastliness, ghastly, gherkin, ghost]
h :: There are no winning responses.
i :: [ilk, ill]
j :: There are no winning responses.
k :: [khaki]
l :: [llama]
m :: There are no winning responses.
n :: [nylon, nymph]
o :: [ozone]
p :: [pneumonia]
q :: [quaff, quest, quibble, quibbling, quondam]
r :: [rye]
s :: [squeamish, squeeze, squeezing, squelch]
t :: [twang, tweak, twice, two]
u :: [uvula]
v :: [vulva]
w :: [whack, where, whiff, who, why]
x :: [xylem]
y :: [yield, yip]
z :: There are no winning responses.
It’s satisfying to have the tree, but my brother is sad because I ruined our game. Wikipedia suggests a few variants on Ghost. Can anyone suggest any other replacement games playable by voice and memory only?
xkcd 
The Matchstick Game. You start off with 15 matchsticks. (I think 15) then player alternate between taking 1~3 sticks. The goal is not to take the last stick.
It’s really just a math game, all you need to remember is the current number.
I remember Mr. Wizard solving it pretty easily, so don’t play this with your little brother. 🙂
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I find Xghost (according to Wikipedia — ever since we started playing this variation we simply refer to it as “Ghost” as the simpler variations prove to be unacceptable) to be a good replacement game, as the winning strategy, while it exists, is probably too hard for the average person to commit to memory. However, the main problems with this variation are 1) most people will need pencil and paper to work out words, and 2) Disputes will be inevitable, so decide on a dictionary early and have it handy.
If you play with a time limit, the focus of play can even be shifted from choosing letters strategically to force the other player to end the word to choosing the most confusing letter possible so that he can’t even think of a word.
Another simple way to “fix” the game is to require that as soon as a word is used in a day, it becomes a non-word for the remainder of the day — so that you can win once with “LL” – llama, but you will lose the second time with “LL” – llamas. This rule can also be combined with any of the Wikipedia variants.
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The only other “Word only” game I can think of requires many more players, and it’s called Mafia. I have no idea how common this game is, but for the uninformed:
For this example, there are 12 players. One player is the narrator/host. Three players are the mafia. One player is the sheriff. One player is the doctor. The non-mafia members, sheriff, and doctor are the “townspeople.”
The game has a night-day cycle. It begins at night. All players close their eyes.
The host asks the mafia to awaken. The mafia open their eyes and identify each other. Only the mafia members and the host know who is in the mafia. The mafia members silently communicate and point to a townsperson. That player is executed by the mafia and eliminated from the game. The mafia goes back to sleep.
The host asks the sheriff to awaken. The sheriff opens his eyes and silently points to another player. The host then tells the sheriff if that player is in the mafia or not. The sheriff goes back to sleep.
The host asks the doctor to awaken. The doctor opens his eyes and silently points to another player. If the player pointed to is the one who was executed by the mafia earlier in the night, then the player is miraculously saved by the doctor. The doctor goes back to sleep.
Morning comes, and the host explains what happened during the night – who died, or almost died. The remaining players then discuss who they believe is in the mafia based on who has been killed. At the end of the day, a vote is taken to put a player to death for murdering the night before (regardless if anyone actually died or not). The player with the most votes is killed and leaves the game.
Night begins again.
The game continues until there are more mafia members then townspeople (mafia wins) or the mafia is eliminated (townspeople win).
The identities of the sheriff, doctor, and mafia are unknown. The sheriff may wish to disclose his identity, but has only his word to prove who he is. The doctor will make himself a target if his identity is disclosed.
This is a great party game. It’s also played on forums from time to time. I’ve played a few games on a forum, and it’s fun there as well, because these is private messaging to help players communicate behind the scenes.
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Pertinent question: what dictionary was used?
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Linked to this from the Ghost entry on wikipedia.
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aortic?
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Good job, this is really interesting. Can you post a link to your source code? I’d like to learn Python, so this would be an interesting way to get started. By the way, I recently blasted through a similar project to calculate the probability of winning a battle in the board game Risk. I used Matlab instead of Python. You can see the results at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~kevin/risk/risk.html
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Back when I went to math competitions with my HS friends, we played a game that (oddly) never gained popularity beyond that circle. The way it works is:
Every player is always lying or always telling the truth. Nobody knows who is doing which at the beginning of the game. Players take turns, and on a player’s turn, the player has to either say a new (not previously used in that round) logical statement regarding which players are telling the truth and which ones are lying, or declare that the statements made thus far constitute a contradiction. If the players does the latter, the game ends, and the player who called the contradiction wins or loses a point depending on whether they were correct or not.
For example, with three players:
1: A: I always tell the truth
2: B: A always tells the truth or C always lies
3: C: Exactly one of us always lies
4: A: Either B always tells the truth or C always lies
5: B: Contradiction! If A, then 2 => B and 4 => C, which is in contradiction with 3. If not A and B, then 2 => not C, which… oh wait, that works fine. I lose.
If this gets too easy with two players (there are, after all, only four possible states with two players), then you can allow the players to be flip-floppers (meaning that they alternate between saying truth and saying falsehoods), which gives you 16 states (flip-floppers can be of one of two different parities).
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So all you have to do is remember the whole ubuntu wordlist 🙂
I guess you should learn a foreign language. Something like japanese where there are no individual letters but syllables would probably be too easy otoh.
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If you want to make it really fun, take the “can’t re-use words” idea and extend it indefinitely. Between two players, once a word is used, it can never be used again for as long as either player can remember it was used.
Regardless, the game is more fun with more than two players, if you can find that many. It gets nearly impossible to force a win with >3 players; you’re just trying to force someone else to lose.
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oh, and cruciate maybe?
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That’s so freak! hahaha
But I can’t figure out a better way of playing it.
Have a nice 2008 🙂
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Password is a great game for 4 players. One person from each team agree upon a secret word, and then take turns giving one-word clues to their teammates until the secret word is guessed. The guessers naturally have the benefit of hearing the one-word clues from both sides, so you need to make clues obvious, and yet un-obvious enough so that the other team won’t be able to take advantage of it if your teammate misses it.
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G-A-M-E — Player 1 loses by spelling “Game”
Nope, Player 2 loses for spelling “gam.”
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>The only other “Word only” game I can think of requires many more players, and it’s called Mafia.
Mafia is a great game, but it requires cards (or some other physical means) of informing every player what they are secretly.
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Word Disassociation:
You must say a word. Any word will do. But your word must have no relation at all to the previous word said. If anyone thinks there is a connection (and the rest of your group agrees it’s real and not imaginary), then you lose. The precise opposite of word association.
I believe that this game is a favourite of many Discordians, though I’ve never caught them red-handed.
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The z words : for zenith, doesn’t player 1 lose assuming “zen” is a word?
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Somewhere in the afterlife, Jame Thurber’s spirit rests more easily today.
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I don’t know a name for it, but I’ve played a word game a few times wherein one player says a word, and the next player’s word has to begin with the last letter of the previous word. Words can’t be repeated, and there has to be a remaining word that begins with the letter ending each word played. You can challenge a word, and the player who named it has to state a word that begins with its last letter.
It’s also solvable, obviously, with a dictionary and a lot of time, but it tends to last a little longer than Ghost in my experience.
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Looking at the examples, I think the rule is “don’t count words three letters or less”, and not “less than three letters”. That explains away “gam” and “zen”, too.
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gam and zen don’t lose considering that more letters can be added on to it to complete the word to a point where it cannot be extended further. Amongst my friends this game is known as challenge. When it got boring we decided to play the same game but in reverse. eg: E-M-A-G to spell GAME. These games work well in chat too..
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Mafia is a great game, and you don’t necessarily need cards or another physical means.
Leader: “Okay everyone close your eyes. One tap is mafia, two taps is doctor, three taps is detective, four taps is vigilante” or whatever.
There are so many variations as more and more people join. With about five you can play fairly with two mafia and one doctor (and two nothings, or maybe add the detective/sheriff). When you hit about 8 you can have three mafia (see, the mafia win if their number makes up half the total population, so you need to take that into consideration). Also adding a Vigilante can help. The Vigilante is a solo killer who can choose to kill per turn and his style is notably different from that of the Mafia. Vigilante can be good or evil, it really depends on the person. It can get better and better.
I played an IRC version of this and we got thirty people playing once: the roles were freaky. There was: Townspeople, Mafia, Doctor, Detective, Vigilante, Informant for the Mafia (snitch, who got to know the identity of one person and relay it to the Mafia and the Lawyer (explained later)), Informant for the Detective (bum, who did the same as the snitch but just for the Detective), Bartender (who could poison one person and himself or learn the identity for himself of one person per turn), Hacker (who revealed to everyone what a person’s role is per turn), Lawyer (who worked with the Mafia that could save one person from getting hung by the town per turn), the Prostitute (who prevented one player from having their turn by “keeping them busy”), and the Drug Lord (who gave people crack each turn and subsequently turned them into Crack Addicts. If the Drug Lord died, the Crack Addicts died).
Phew. Some strategy while I’m at it: Classic situation: Newbie Detective finds a Mafia on turn one and yells out (after some civilian has kicked the bucket) I’M THE SHERIFF AND RALPH IS THE MAFIA! Well Ralph may or may not die, but this Detective is screwed … unless the Doctor saves him and given the relative intelligence of the group that might not happen. On the IRC version, the Detective was allowed to invite civilians/good guys that he had checked and cleared (the Detective got to know exactly what position the people he investigated was) into the specified channel that the Gamebot was in. The Mafia had the Mafia, Snitch, and Lawyer in the room. Everyone else were alone.
*Pant, Pant* If this makes any sense let me know.
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I’ve considered playing Ghost on an “open-ended” basis, much harder to game. What you build is a string of letters anywhere within the word. You can add letters on either side. All you have to do is prove that you are building that string towards a word.
An exemplar would be G…UG…UGL….UGLO…. now the sequence only yields BUGLOSS and ZEUGLODONT.
Of course there will be a finite number of options and outcomes, driven by the dictionary you choose for arbitration. But it gives Ghost a new life.
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What if you’re playing with more than 2 people?
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Sometimes to spice it up, we play you can add letters to both ends — not sure if that fixes the problem, but it might help.
Also, differing minimum word lengths.
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Ian, yes, it makes sense, although maybe only because I’ve played regular Mafia before. Man, that IRC version is pretty intense, and all of a sudden I REALLY want to play it.
As for Ghost, I’ve only played with 4+ people, but once it gets to about 6, it’s pretty hard to predict how things will go all the way around the circle. I played with 10 once while waiting for a plane, it was confusing.
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Besides the fact that zen is three letters, it’s a proper noun. At least that’s why it’s not in either of the tournament scrabble dictionaries.
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heterosexuality?
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i was about to suggest the game that nick mentioned – me and my sister call it rock dominoes, because it’s like dominoes but with words, and we use categories, usually rock bands (extended to any band/artiste usually). you call a band, for example oasis, and the next person has to call one that begins with the last letter of the previous band, so it would be S. you can’t re-use bands either within the same game, or within the same day. one of the only winning plays i know is to use a band that ends in X, of which there are more than bands starting with X. obviously with different categories (countries, famous people, films) it changes.
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In the movie Go, the characters play a game similar to the one Nick names above, but instead of the next word beginning with the last letter of the first one, they use only dead celebrities and the next celebrity’s first name begins with the first letter of the last name used previously. So: Louis Armstrong – Albert Einstein – Ella Fitzgerald, etc. Naturally the criteria can be changed to make it more interesting–I’d be horrible at only naming dead celebrities and it wouldn’t be much fun, while some people would be way too good if they could use ones who were alive.
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5-letter word game.
As many players as you want – works fine with two.
Each player thinks of a 5-letter word with no duplicate letters.
In turn, each player guesses a 5-letter word for the next player, and they get told how many letters they have in the word.
Figure out the next player’s word before yours is found out and you win.
It’s a bit trickier if you don’t write anything down.
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here’s a variation on RodeoClown’s game, but you need pen and paper so i’m not sure if it qualifies
It’s called Jade, my sister and brother and i play it all the time. It works best with two people, but sometimes we would have a competition to see who could guess the word in the fewest tries.
one person picks a five letter word with no duplicate letters
the second person writes down the alphabet at the top of their paper and a series of 5 letter words with no duplicate letters. The fisrt person will then write down how many letters in each word are correct eg:
if my word was table
chair 1
lamps 1
ect.
i’m not sure if the alphabet was in the original rules but it does help to cross of letters as you eliminate them
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When I played Mafia we always required that the narrator make up a story for how the victim died, including a story of how the doctor rescued them if applicable. Also, when people were accused, they could make up stories in their defense about where they were when the narrator’s story occurred. The stories always ended up being hilarious, and with Ian’s variant with so many roles they could get really ridiculous 🙂
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The “last letter of the previous word is the first letter of the next” game that several people have mentioned is also popular in Japan, where it’s called “shiritori”. Of course, you go by syllable/character due to the nature of the Japanese alphabet. Also, picking a word that ends with the “n” character is considered a loss, since no Japanese word begins with that character.
I the manga/anime Genshiken, the characters at one point play “Gundam shiritori”, using only names, places, and concepts from the long-running Gundam giant-robot franchise.
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There’s also subtle lyric games that you can play with other people. These mostly involve slipping lyrics into conversation and seeing if the other person can pick up on the clues and then begin to go along. The thing with this game is once you start you’re never gonna give it up. Though I’m sure it’s never gonna let you down.
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There’s The Game of Questions from Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The rules are
1) The first player asks a question.
2) The second player responds in the form of a question, no statements.
3) The question must be relevant somehow, not a non sequitur. No repetition, no rhetoric and no hesitation.
4) The game is scored like a tennis match.
The game can be extended to more than one player. My dad and I used to play this on hikes when I was a kid.
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My uncle and I always play word games around made up rule sets. Green Glass Doors is a common example where every word in the sentence has to follow to rule: “contains a set of double letters.” The rule is easy to see if you’re told but often is elusive. We take turns making up a rule set in our heads like: “the first letter of each word and the last letter of each word directly follow each other in alphabetical order.” Then we give out a phrase, or series or phrases that follow the rules and the other player has to crak the code (as it were). Marathon Runners (follows the previous rule I mentioned).
There are tons of different “speech rule” type games I’ve played where every member playing has to try and get the rule right and the moderator has to tell them whether or not they’ve properly caught on.
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Jotto. Usually played with paper but doable, with practice, as a memory-only game. You and your opponent each choose a secret five-letter word. No repeating letters allowed in the word. Player 1 challenges with a five-letter word, also with no repeating letters. Player 2 responds with the number of letters the challenge word shares with his secret word. Alternate turns, and the first one to guess the other’s word, wins the round.
For the first four guesses, try SPUNK / CRAZY / LOVED / MIGHT.
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I’ve always enjoyed playing Geography. The first player names a place which starts with the letter ‘A’. Then each player takes the last letter of the previous place and uses that as the first letter of the next place. For example: Albany => YellowstonE => EriE => EnglanD => DartmoutH => HawaiI => IllinoiS etc. You get the idea. Variations can be including or excluding rivers, lakes, cities, etc.
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Another variation on shiritori that my family plays is to use any words at all, but require that each subsequent word be one letter longer than the last. So one game might go, end => dare => enter => return => neither…
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‘Psychiatrist’, also known as ‘the most annoying game in the world when played in the right/wrong crowd’… If you’ve ever played Icehouse games, it’s sort of like Zendo without pieces.
Played with a group of any size; two is possible, but more people is more fun. One person is the “psychiatrist”, and everybody else is a “patient”. The psychiatrist leaves the room while everybody else agrees on a “psychosis”. The psychosis is a rule that describe how every patient must answer questions. The psychiatrist then tries to guess the psychosis by asking as many questions as necessary of whichever patients s/he wants.
There aren’t really any “easy” psychoses, but here are some examples:
– Answers must consist of exactly four words. (Harder: an even number of words)
– Answer all questions as if you were the person to your left.
– All questions must be answered with another question.
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>G-A-M-E ? Player 1 loses by spelling ?Game?
>
>Nope, Player 2 loses for spelling ?gam.?
Yeah, and player two would lose on A-B-S-O-R-B by spelling “abs”.
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I can’t believe no on mentioned anything like this…
It’s a game I call the Bus Game, although that is pretty arbitrary. The game can play out with tons of people, but you need a long attention span for that. It can be played with a deck of cards, or merely at the mercy of the host.
Ok, now for the actual game:
Basically, it’s a verbal MMRPG (no O, it’s not online). Bear with me, there are no _completely_ fantasy elements (Magic, Space Travel, etc.).
One person is the host; like in mafia, they are God. This person should be fair and experienced.
Every other player starts out in the same situation, but in different places so that they cannot interact in the first couple of turns (if they try, the host should cause them to fail). In the variant called the Bus Game, they all start out on crashed tour busses in an unfamiliar area.
The object of the game is to not be taken to any institution of any kind, public or private, such as schools, hospitals, prisons, NSA holding areas, etc., and to gain as much money and power in the process.
At the beginning of each turn, the host tells the current player their situation (the host needs a good memory) and asks them what they are going to do (simple actions like get off the bus before the police come). The host allows them to complete on action, and start a second before moving on to the next player.
-VARIATION: If playing with a deck of cards, the card need to have been divided evenly to the players, and then at the beginning of each round, players draw a card form the top of their pile and play it on the table. The players are “ranked” in the order of their cards to determine their “favor” with the gods on that turn. If a player plays the highest card, they have good luck (and success in their endeavours); the lowest card, bad luck.
The actions of the players and the outcomes need to be realistic:
If a player says “I see player X through the window and throw a knife at him (to kill, thus eliminating another competitor), this action would fail if that player hasn’t picked up a knife anywhere or read Knife Throwing for Dummies. (Yes, I have had players hijack cars to get to the library, and then read books for a few turns. I have also had a player rob a Toys-R-Us with a staple gun and then get beaten up by a small child because they had no self defence skills.)
It all relies on the creativity of the players and especially the host. It can be especially tiring for the host, though, when players get themselves into tricky situations that the host has to make interesting.
Perhaps it defeats the purpose of this discussion because there no way to “beat” the game, other than learning the personal style of the host. I find, however, that I never play any “normal” word games when in the company of people who know this one instead, so it can’t be that boring…
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I’ve always been a fan of blindfolded connect-four. On every turn, you have to describe the whole board, though. We usually only used a 5×5 board to keep things rememberable.
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rozencrantz:
I always preferred 3d tic-tac-toe. You have to name where you’re going like 313 or 211.
If you’re allowed pen and paper, things get a lot more interesting. You can play the game with the grid of dots (where you draw a line every turn), even battleship.
Actually, battleship can get really interesting if you take away the white pegs, don’t announce when you sink a ship, or let players fire as many shots in a turn as they have ships.
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I would like to propose a different, and untried, “fix” for Ghost.
If you want to prevent people from calculating the solution to you Ghost dictionary in advance, allow the players to nominate sets of words to be subtracted from the dictionary at the start of the game.
For example:
player 1 nominates “words beginning with vowels”
player 2 nominates “words containing adjacent identical letters”
Player 2 is not allowed to nominate a set that contains all of the words in player 1’s nomination. For example, player 2 could not use “words that do not begin with h, j, m or z”. This rule is intended to prevent player 2 from having advanced knowledge of the dictionary.
Players should be able to argue that their nominated set contains less than 20% or the words in the dictionary. This rule is to prevent the dictionary becoming too small.
After the words have been chosen, the nominated words are treated as if they are not in the dictionary. That is, spelling them will not lose the point and they can not be given to show a string is the start of a word.
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If anyone’s interested in playing Mafia online, there’s a large community at http://www.mafiascum.net, that has all sorts of games ranging from newbie for people that have just started and themed games where every role is based on a certain theme (be it a movie, book or something else). It’s really fun, typically a game will stretch on for a few weeks though so if you’re impaitent don’t bother. There’s also games on the SomethingAwful forums.
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RodeoClown and DavidF almost took my entry, which is a four-letter version of Jotto, and the only one I’d ever known by that name.
Two players each choose a secret 4-letter word. Duplicate letters are allowed. Proper nouns and anagrams are not (except for cases where there is an actual word spelled the same, such as “ford” or “aids”). Extending a 3-letter word with “-s” is legal (though it is also a quick way to get your word guessed).
Players then alternate guessing the other’s word. The ‘defender’ must report the total number of letters of the ‘attacker’s’ word which are BOTH correct AND in the correct location. Game ends when someone is forced to respond, “Four.”
Example: PlayerA chooses “life” and PlayerB chooses “boat”
A: “foot.”
B: “2. wisp.”
A: “1. feet.”
B: “1. wise.”
A: “2. moot.”
B: “2…” etc.
Easy to play, easy to teach, and most people have enough 4-letter words in them to last a while. The only trouble I usually run into is cache pollution, where I remember too many of the previous rounds to keep track of the current one.
–Patrick
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I agree with your brother.
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Is it just me, or does player 1 only lose on G-A-M-E if there are three players?
When I first learnt Ghost, player 1 began the word with two letters, and each player added one letter thereafter. Would that make much difference to the solution?
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