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 
So David’s figured out the Ubuntu dictionary lacks “aortic” and “cruciate”. Even before reading the comments, I noticed “ilmenite”. They all favour player 1.
With the aid of a dictionary I found some that favour player 2:
If you allow slang, “het”.
If you don’t, “hetaera” or “hetaira”. (An ancient Greek equivalent of a geisha.)
Or “heterosis”. (Hybrid vigour.)
Or “heterosporous”/”heterospory”.
Or “heterostylous”/”heterostyly”.
That takes care of H, at least until you rebuild your tree. For J: “jus”. For M:
If you allow poetic/literary words: “mavis”. (A song thrush.)
If you allow rare spellings: “mizen”.
Or “mozetta” (plural “mozette”), an alternative spelling of “mozzetta”, a high-ranking Catholic cleric’s cape.
Finally, Z:
Regrettably, “zombify”/”zombifies”/”zombified” are listed as informal.
But you can still use “zucchetto”. (A Catholic cleric’s skullcap.)
Of all of those, the only ones my spell-checker knows are “aortic” and “mizen”.
It’s amazing how useful the Roman Catholic Church is in this game…
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Well if you are playing multiple rounds you could have a round start with the last two letters from the previous round.
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Hmm..very interesting. You keep talking about 1 and 2 players only. We keep playing GHOST with more than two players sometimes. I would want the mathematicians to compute the various outcomes then.
Reverse Ghost is also great fun like BadarZ said. and it is much more taxing on your verbal and analytical parts of the brain.
When more people are playing, we use the DONKEY thing.. where for every loss the player becomes D, then DO and so on.
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Siraj, interesting. Instead of DONKEY, I’ve always played with GHOST. Personally, I prefer Superghost, because Ghost is just too easy.
Sam, thanks for the link. Check out Mafiascum’s newest member. 🙂
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Mornington Crescent. ’nuff said.
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I know of only one game that can be played very easily, and that is The Game. If you haven’t been introduced to The Game yet have a look at http://ilostthegame.org/ , you’d be surprised how many people around you are playing it when you accidentally loose.
So yeah, this post made me loose the game 😛
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I haven’t read all the posts, so perhaps someone else named this. You need at least 4 people, I suppose, and the game goes like this. One of you thinks of a “pattern” for words… it can be really silly such as “it begins with a”, “it has four letters” or stranger things like “it begins with a letter which is also the initial of one of our names” or “exactly on letter appears twice in the word, and the rest once”. You start by giving a word that fits the rule, and one that doesn’t. Then you go in turns proposing a word or trying to come up with the rule. The one who picked the rule has to confirm or deny that the words said adapt to the rule. ventualy, if it comes back to him, he gives another example.
It can be really fun, the last time we played it we used both “hard” examples above, and it took wuite a while to solve.
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Haven’t played this since I was in my drinking-game days, so it might be too simple…
Think of a couple of words (or things around you) that are connected in some way, then think of some that aren’t. Then put them in this “frame”: i.e., Billy loves Halloween, but doesn’t like Christmas. Billy loves cheese, but doesn’t like gouda. Billy loves battles, but doesn’t like war. The other person would have to guess Billy likes double letters. It can, of course, be much more complicated than that. But not before I’ve had my coffee.
It’s better if the two words are very closely related (like battles and war, glass and windows) – until the person catches on, they’re trying to figure out how those two things are different.
Also – did you know how many popular cheeses have double letters? I didn’t, ’til I tried to think of one that did not: cheddar, mozzarella, swiss…
We had one game where the difference ended up being that the the things he loved were reflective, the things he didn’t like were not – like spoon and napkin, glass and curtain. So it doesn’t just have to be actual letter patterns.
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one more version of shiritori (last letter is start of next) different categories, like number of letters, we always start with 2 letter words and increase as people lose. 4 and 5 are the most fun
a game i don’t like is where you say a movie and the next person names an actor/actress in that movie and the next person has to name a different movie with that actor, next names a different actor…an odd number of people is suggested.
i know a few pencil and paper games, like sprouts, but i can’t think of anything else that hasn’t been mentioned
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> So David?s figured out the Ubuntu dictionary lacks ?aortic? and ?cruciate?.
I knew this would eventually turn into a competition to see who had the biggest dict.
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A good game that doesn’t require anything but memory is this version of even-odd that I learned in math class:
Two players, one is even and one is odd.
Each shows either a 1 or a 2 on their hands at the same time.
If the sum is odd, the odd player gets the sum added to their score.
If the sum is even, the even player gets the sum added to their score.
(1&1: +2 for even, 1&2: +3 for odd, 2&2: +4 for even)
Keep going for however long and the person with the highest score wins.
It has an interesting solution, actually, but you need some sort of random number generator to play “perfectly,” so it would be good to play with your brother.
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Thanks Kree, you made me (and some friends ;)) loose
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My friend and I play a game called the numbers game. It can be played with two or more players. Each round one player picks a random number in their head, any number at all that they feel is acceptable. The other player (or players) then guess what the number is. If they get it wrong (quite likely) then they are told it is wrong. If they get it right they are told it is right. The round then ends and the player does not reveal what the number was. The round continues with the next player thinking of a new number and so on.
The game is very meaningless and goalless. All that happens is that if you play quite a lot, your thoughts and the way you pick random numbers start to magically synchronize. It is very interesting to play.
There is another game I play with another friend called the card game. It’s basically the same except one player uses a pack of cards to generate random cards which the other player has to guess. I also developed that in to a wonderful card trick that is utterly amazing only 1 in 52 times.
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About replacement games, I know only guessing animals (or other well-defined objects). One player chooses an animal, while the other has to guess which one was it, by asking such questions about the animal that have a yes/no answer. And you define how many direct tries (“Is it a lion?”) at a species a player can have – one, or maybe three… if there are two people playing.
If there are more, then they take turns asking questions. If answer is yes, they can ask another question, if it is no, next person asks. The one who guessed gets a point and is the next one to choose an animal.
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Over here in Germany the popular version of Mafia is “Werewolves”. The idea is basically the same, except that you have werewolves (same as mafia), citizens (also the same), and (which of these is a matter of agreement):
– the witch who has two magic drinks; one kills, one saves life. After every killing by the werewolves she is told the victim and can decide whether to save him/her (this includes herself). She can also decide when to use the poisonous drink and on whom. Once both are used she becomes a mere citizen.
– the little girl is allowed to peek, but obviously shouldn’t get caught by the wolves
– the mayor is elected in the first round and has two votes on who is to kill by the citizens. Often candidates are allowed to say why they would like to be elected.
– amor selects two people during the first night which become the secret couple. Only they (and amor and the host, of course) know who they are. Once one of them dies (whether werewolve or not) the other dies as well of broken heart.
Of course there can be even more roles.
Usually there are long discussions during daytime who os to kill. Mostly behaviour in these is an important factor in decisions.
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There are more words that start with ll: http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/search?p=ll*&searchmode=normal
Well, actually just Llullaillaco and llano, and I suppose they wouldn’t let you win, but the first time you did it you would make your brother say “challenge” 😛
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Wouldn’t Zebra be a win for the 2nd player?
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My dad and I created a game while waiting in line at Six Flags Great America a couple years back, and we’ve kept it going ever since. It’s called Threes, and is very simple. We like it because nobody ever wins or loses.
You ask the other player for at least three responses to a statement. For instance, “Name three novels by Stephen King that haven’t been turned into movies or TV shows.” This would be a difficult feat for anyone who’s never actually read King, but wouldn’t be a challenge for me or my dad. The idea is to get the other player to think, not to stump them. I would never ask my dad, “Name three of Lil Slugger’s victims,” and he would never ask me, “Name three pitchers for the Cincinnati Reds,” because we know the other player doesn’t know that. My favorites questions are the ones when you start having a conversation about the answers and forget to keep playing. It’s great for doing yardwork, riding in a car with a broken stereo, or for getting to know someone.
Now, name three stick figures.
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Play Questions – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questions_%28game%29
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One of my favorite word games that needs no extra equipment is Contact. It doesn’t fill quite the same niche as Ghost, because Contact requires at least 5 players, but it’s a fun party game when you have a bunch of people around.
Here’s how it works. One person picks a word, and throughout the game, the other players are trying to guess the word. I’ll call the player with the word the leader. The leader tells the other players the first letter. Then, the other players guess at the word, but instead of just stating a guess out loud, they think of a possible word that could fit, and come up with a clue for it. For instance, if the letter is “c”, and a player wants to guess the word “corset”, he might give the clue “does it shape the belly?”
Now the leader needs to figure out that the clue refers to “corset”, and say “no, the word is not corset” (or, if the word is “corset”, say “yes, it is corset” and the person who gave the clue wins). If the leader can’t think of a word that matches the clue with the currently known prefix, then other players who do figure out what the word refers to can shout out “contact”. After one or more people have contact, and the leader can’t think of a word that matches the clue in a reasonable amount of time, she counts down “3, 2, 1” at which point all the people who had contact say the word (simultaneously) they were thinking of that matches the clue. If at least one person had the same word as the person who proposed the clue, then the leader has to give the next letter of the word, and people keep guessing, but restricted to the total known prefix, until someone finally gets the word. The player who figured out the word wins, and usually becomes the next leader, or at least gets to decide who the next leader is.
Here’s an example of play, to make it a little clearer how it works:
Leader: The letter is “k”
Jim: Is it a class with five-year old kids?
Leader: No, it is not kindergarden.
Julie: Is it being really nice to someone?
Leader: Hmm…
Jim: Contact!
Amber: Contact!
Leader: Oh! No, it is not kindness
Lance: Is he on the road, with his brain squirming like a toad?
Julie: Contact!
Leader: Um…
Amber: Oh, right, contact!
Leader: I should know this…
Leroy: Contact!
Leader: I can’t think of it. Ok, ready? 3, 2, 1…
Lance, Amber, Leroy in unison: Killer!
Leader: Oh, right, from Riders On The Storm. OK, the next letter is n.
Amber: “KN”, huh? Hmm…
* etc *
OK, now with the example out of the way, here are some clarifications for how it works in certain situations.
Say the letter is “c”, and someone asked “is it red?”, thinking of crimson, and got contact. Now, the leader sits and things for a while, and says “No, it is not a cherry”. That is a perfectly acceptable response to the clue, because the clue was not specific enough. As long as the leader can make a response that matches the clue, they can avoid having to give up a letter even if their word isn’t what the questioner was thinking of. And, if the word the leader has is “crimson”, then the leader can say “no it is not a cherry” to avoid having the game end so soon, at least until the question comes up with a more specific clue.
Generally, the word in question is supposed to be a noun. The words referred to by clues are usually allowed to be anything but a proper noun, though it’s usually considered to be acceptable to use a clue that refers to a proper noun which is a homonym for a valid word; for instance, I could use the clue “Is it a Steve who revolutionized the online music business?” and expect “Jobs” as the answer, because “jobs” is not a proper noun.
If a clue or word requires specialized knowledge, then it’s not allowed; you can’t ask a question like “is it the reification of the rest of the program’s computation after evaluating an expression?” and expect “continuation”, unless you’re playing with a group of Lisp hackers.
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Noun-Noun-Noun. The greatest geek-proof game ever. My high school math team developed it on a long bus ride back to school during a lengthy debate on the optimal rocks paper scissors strategy. The game only requires 2+ reasonable people (or 3+ unreasonable people) The game is played exactly like rocks paper scissors but the players choices are not limited to rocks paper or scissors, instead they can pick any object they want. The two objects must be reveled simultaneously, or else the slow player auto-losses. The two players then explain why their object would win a fight (ie a rock would rip through paper) The best explanation wins. Objects can only be used once per game and explanations can’t go over 2 minutes and there are no rebuttal to the explanation. There are limits to how many adjectives you can use in your object but these don’t need to be set up untill after a few games have ended along the lines of “red undefeatable spoon vs green fork that can’t lose”.
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Sausages is a game for 2 players. Players take turns naming a word. The first player to names ‘sausages’ is the winner.
Winning is so trivial as to not be fun. The fun comes from attempting to win just barely before your opponent was going to.
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A good mathematical game for two players is Sylver Coinage. Players take turns naming a positive integer that is not the sum of multiples of previously named integers. The player to name 1 loses.
For example, if I named 4 as the opening move, you could not name 4, 8, 12, 16, …; if you then named 5, I could not name 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, …
It hasn’t yet been solved, but there is a very good discussion of it in _Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays_ by Berlekamp, et al. as well as at http://www.monmouth.com/~colonel/sylver/
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I lost the game…
Brian, I really like your idea for a game. I may just have to try it sometime…
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I’m surprised nobody mentioned this, but “blubber” would be a loss for player 2 since “blub” is a word, unless its not in either of the wordlists you cited.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/blub
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A good game for a larger number of players is silent football (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_football). Although it does contain an actual silent phase requiring more than just talking, the fun comes mostly from pointing out other people’s syntactical errors without making any yourself.
Also sausages sounds a lot like the color-country game (takes turns naming a color of a country, the first to name a country loses).
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> G-A-M-E — Player 1 loses by spelling “Game”
I don’t understand how that is so. If the turns are 1-2-1-2, doesn’t the second player lose for G-A-M-E? (Presuming that G-A-M is not recognized as a word, that is.)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim
Nim can be played verbally by one play stating the size of the starting piles (e.g. 3, 5, 7), and then next player stating the size of the piles after he has removed from one pile (e.g. 3, 5, 6).
Unfortunately the trick to winning is quite simple to figure out (even if you don’t read the Wikipedia page, which tells you), and the proof is relatively simple as well.
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I would think that a subtractive game would have a larger number of possibilities, perhaps one with anagrams, and a less easily coded solution in python.
take a word with N letters (n = big)
enterprise (n=10)
the next player must come up either with a pure anagram of the last word, or an anagram of a set of n-m, where m is like 1 or 2.
So, for example, presenter would be a valid second move. Repeat where n = 9. The person to be able to form the last word loses (or wins), according to preference. This could be done by people with good memories without paper or other tools.
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I haven’t read absolutely all the posts but I think the games I’ll explain have not been mentioned.
Here in Catalonia we play a game called “L’assassí” (obviusly, these means “The assassin”). It requires a Spanish cards deck but it can easily be replaced by a French deck. Essentially you need a card for the assassin, one for the policeman and one for the prostitute. Then you need one card for each people remaining.
It works like that:
– The policeman has to guess who the assassin is and the assassin has to kill everyone before that (so it would be nice for him/her to guess who the policeman is in advance). If the policeman fails in his guessing he loses.
– The assassin kills by winking at people. If you’re killed you turn over your card and say “I’m dead” (you can wait a while after you’ve been killed, put 10 or 15 seconds).
– The assassin can also make some acomplicees by sticking the tongue out and from that moment on they can kill as well (and policeman’s work increases).
– Finally the prostitute can resurrect by blowing kisses to death people. Her role is the worst (or the best) because the assassin will try to kill her as soon as possible and if the policeman discovers her she cannot play anymore.
– By the way, the policeman cannot be killed, but he has to watch out because if someone tries to kill him maybe is not the assassin but an acomplicee.
Oh, and if you want just a word game, without extra stuff needed we play what is called “La frase maleïda” which can be translated as “The cursed sentence”. One person starts with a word, and the other one says the previous word and one more, but in order to make a sentence. The third person repeats the two previous words and adds a new one and so on.
Example:
1st player: “The”
2nd plauer: “The house”
3rd player: “The house was”
4th player: “The house was very”
etc.
Of course once you run out of players the first one continues and you keep doing that until someone doesn’t remember exactly what s/he had to say.
A variant of this game is selecting a topic like “fruits” and then each player has to say all the fruits which have been said before and add a new one. The first one who doesn’t remember all the fruits in order loses.
And of course, about Ghost, it would be interesting to run the algorithm in other languages different from English.
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I don’t know what you consider trivial, but a fun game is also the listing game: you come up with a category, e.g. animals starting with l and then the players have to name one a time until they cannot think of any more. It requires some reason to give up after you couldn’t think of a new word for some time.
It’s part of the fun when word come to your mind long after the game is over.
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Hey, yeah! Wouldn’t zebra win for the second player??
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>> 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.”
> I don’t understand how that is so. If the turns are 1-2-1-2, doesn’t the
> second player lose for G-A-M-E? (Presuming that G-A-M is not
> recognized as a word, that is.)
I don’t get it either. If each player adds a single letter, then for both of these examples (an even number of letter) the same player would lose. Player 2, if player 1 starts.
I thought maybe you alternated the starting players, but your third example has player 1 starting, just like in the second example.
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> Hey, yeah! Wouldn’t zebra win for the second player??
No, because once the second player added “e”, the first player would add “n” and not “b”. And so the second player won’t be able to complete “zen” to “zebra” (Mind you, if you allow a more extensive word list, Wikipedia claims there’s a Japanese word written “zenra”, but that’s beside the point).
The idea isn’t that there are no words starting with “Z” with an odd number of letters, but that it’s possible for the first player to force the final word away from them.
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But Zen is a word.
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Ah, gotcha… Thanks for the clarification Yaron.
# Matt: Zen is a word, but it’s 3 letters, so doesn’t count.. -_-
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Oh, okay. I misread it as “less than 3 letters”.
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So besides Jotto (my Jotto page with some variants is at http://www.aq.org/~kevin/jotto/, and I’ve played Jotto with no paper while driving), a nice no-equipment game is something someone taught me as “1-2-3”, although it may have other names. So, basically, two people count to three, and then after three they each say a word (simultaneously). Without any discussion, this process repeats. The goal is to say the same word. So, for example:
Player 1: “boat”
Player 2: “ham”
So, maybe Player 1 thinks that a gravy boat is something that would be on the table with ham, and maybe Player 2 thinks that a trough is sort of like a boat that uncooked ham (i.e., a pig) eats out of. So, after another three count, they would say:
Player 1: “gravy”
Player 2: “trough”
I believe there was also a stipulation that you can’t reuse words, so you couldn’t go back and say “boat” for the next round. Play continues until the two players eventually get the same word.
When I played this game, it was in a group of people, so one person would just say “1”, and then someone else would say “2”, and then they would say “3” together, as a way of figuring out who was ready to play. We played this while we were making and assembling origami boxes to use as centerpieces for my sister’s wedding.
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I can’t believe noone has mentioned my personal favorite, “BBout”.
Players begin the game by saying “BB in”. Optionally a pinky lock can be used at the same time.
Once you start playing, anytime you say a word that starts with a ‘b’, everyone else that is playing pummels you until you say ‘bbout’.
Also note that if you say ‘bbout’ without saying a b word, you must say it again for the pummeling to stop.
There’s no way to end the game really….
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Botticelli is the voice and memory game of choice among my friends. It helps a lot if you and the person/people you’re playing with know similar cultural references.
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Way to rip off Gary Larson.
Re: Amazon Basin.
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Here’s another one from math team:
At any given time, each player has some number of fingers up on each hand. You start with one up on each. A turn consists of tapping hand B with hand A, where A and B are different and A is one of your hands. (So you can tap your left hand with your right hand, for example.) Then add to hand B the number of fingers currently on hand A.
If at any time one of your hands has all five fingers up, it goes to zero and is “dead”. If both your hands are dead at the same time, you lose. However, if one of your hands is dead and the other has an even number of fingers on it, even if it isn’t your turn, you can “split” those fingers between your two hands. (So if you have zero on your left hand and four on your right, you can change it to two and two.) A dead hand can’t be hit and can’t hit any other hand.
Sample game:
I’m notating each person’s hands as x-y, where x is left and y is right.
A has 1-1, B has 1-1. A hits himself.
A has 1-2, B has 1-1. B hits A’s right.
A has 1-3, B has 1-1. A hits B’s left with his right.
A has 1-3, B has 4-1. B hits A’s left with his left.
A has 0-3, B has 4-1. A hits B’s right with his right.
A has 0-3, B has 4-4. B hits his left with his right.
A has 0-3, B has 0-4. B splits.
A has 0-3, B has 2-2. A hits B’s left with his right.
A has 0-3, B has 0-2. B chooses not to split, and hits A’s right.
A has 0-0, B has 0-2. B wins.
It probably has a winning strategy, but I’ve never gone through and figured it out. It was interesting enough to keep my friend and I occupied through a long, boring high school graduation rehearsal.
For good measure, here are a few other Mafia variants:
– The Magician (also called the Bus Driver) can switch two people during the night. Whatever was supposed to happen to one (killing, being saved, being slept with by the prostitute, or whatever) happens to the other instead. If the Magician is very smart or lucky, (s)he can get the mafia to kill one of their own using this power.
– When I played in high school, the prostitute was originally a useless role having no bearing on the game. Each morning, the narrator would announce, “Oh, and X got laid. Congratulations.” Later, we added the role of “person with [insert STD here]”, and the prostitute would die if they slept with that person.
– With enough people, add a Serial Killer who acts just like the mafia, but alone. SK wins iff they’re the last person alive. With a very large number, you can have mafia and werewolves, two evil teams. And with a huge number, add a SK to that, too!
– There are also strange roles that win alone under special circumstances. For example, there’s one (I forget what it’s called) that automatically survives the first time the mafia kills them. After that, the narrator somehow informs them that the attempt on their life has been made. They then win the game (and everyone else loses) if they die during the day and lose if killed at night.
You can really do a lot with Mafia when it’s played online.
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The word Hocus invalidates h.
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There’s something that we play…that’s probably little more than a one-upsmanship on whose vocabulary lasts the longest…but we pick a word that ends in ‘ate’ ‘iate’, tious, ‘ceous’ or ‘tion’ and just keep going back and forth until one of us is stumped….we can’t repeat words, oh and if you wait more than about 5 seconds to take your turn..the other player automatically wins which usually involves much crowing and guffawing….I guess if needed a name..”suffixes would be a good title.
I do however really like the idea for Threes set forth by Ogreman Sam….3 stick figures are: Mrs Roberts, Black hat, and Stallman
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I played ghost with my family a great deal on car trips, but we always played double-ended. There is another game that we would play though called “Inky Pinky” (probably not the real name).
It works like this: one person thinks of two words with the same number of syllables that rhyme (ex. “comic tonic”). Then, they think of a clue and tell the other players what it is (ex. “a cure for xkcd”). Then they say how many syllables the word has by modifying the phrase “Inky Pinky” (e.g. for 1 syllable: “Pink Ink”, for 3 syllables: “Inkity Pinkity”, for 4 syllables: “Inkinkity Pinkinkity” etc.). The other players then try to guess what the two words are.
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@Taber
My friend and I have created a game like that, link in my name. It’s called Gesture Warz. We have 300 defined characters and pure logic decides victory. For example:
Mr. T and Chuck Norris would obviously be a tie because they blow up the world. Chuck Norris beats every Spartan from 300 because he kicks a boulder that explodes into 300 pieces, killing all of them. Chuck loses to the character Nothing. We also have everything, some things, quite a few things, and Shakira beats most male characters.
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I’ve played a different version of ghost, similar to the game Mastermind. Player 1 thinks of a five-letter word, then Player 2 guesses five-letter words. For each word guessed, Player 1 tells Player 2 how many of its letters are contained in the secret word.
So, say the secret word is “ghost”. Player 2 guesses “games”, so Player 1 tells him that he has two correct letters (there’s no way to tell if they’re in the right position or not). Player 2 continues guessing five-letter words until he guesses the correct word.
This game takes a lot of memory, but can absolutely be played verbally only. My family and I play it on long car trips. It can also be played with pencil and paper, to keep track of what words have been guessed and what letters you know are wrong.
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I can’t believe nobody’s suggested Host. It’s exactly like Ghost, except that you’re spelling a word, the first letter of which has been omitted. For “absorb”, the sequence would be B-S-O-R-B.
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First: I lost the game.
Now the rest of the response: These are two games I used to play quite often with my brother in long car rides.
The first game we called “The Astounding Atrociously Annoying Alliteration Game” of course the biggest irony being that the game title was not a true alliteration. The rules were very simple, make a 3 word alliteration starting at any letter started the game. The next player (typically just my brother and I would play; but sometimes the whole family would get in on the game) will then make a 3 word alliteration starting with the next letter of the alphabet. Usually it helped if you were thinking about what your next play would be before your turn cuz the other players are allowed to heckle you if you take too long (or help you if the are so inclined). Once you reached “Z” then the next players would start with a four word alliteration starting with “A” and it would keep going. We would be rather lax about what counted as alliterations when dealing with the hard letters like “X” (allowing alliterations that did not start with the letter “X” or just fudging it and allowing the string for that letter to not be a true alliteration). I think the farthest we ever got was six words long (and we did have a rule that the full 3, 4, 5… etc from before could not be reused, but single words were OK).
The second game is a spin off of the classic Sesame Street segment “One of These Things is Not Like the Others,” but with a twist. The point was not to go for the obvious similarities (in fact often there were none). We would pick 4 random objects, often something seen a road sign or something, and then have to find a way to include 3 of the items, but also exclude the fourth. Then the other person would come up with a correlation between three items while excluding a different one. The point was to have a different set of circumstances that excluded each item for a different reason (ie.you can’t name a shared color more than once). You alternate who picks the 4 items, and/or each player picks one or two (depending on the number of players, although we always only played with just the two of us) As an example, the items could be: a penguin, a basketball, an orange (fruit), and some sushi. You could say “A Penguin, a Basketball, and sushi should all have black in them, but an orange should not (unless it’s a bad orange, but that doesn’t count)” or “A Basketball, an orange, and sushi can all be circular (or round) but a penguin is not” or “An orange, a penguin and sushi can all be eaten, but a Basketball cannot” or “Penguin, Basketball, and orange are all spelled with the letter “E” but there is no “E” in sushi”. There isn’t really a “winner” in the game, it’s just a fun way to spend a car ride, but I guess if you named four items and even you can’t make one item NOT part of the group while including the others, then you lose.
There is a third game that I remembered while I was writting about these two that I played once at work. “Are you on the boat?” or something like that. Basically someone is going on a trip and is bringing something with them, this defines the rules for the game. So if I “Kelsa Delphi” am bringing “Killer Donkeys” on the boat, the next person would ask me “If I bring _______, can I come on the boat?” If the thing they brought matched the rule then they can come, if it doesn’t they need to try again. This game works best with a large group of people, and if you help some one out by telling the first couple of people what to bring on the boat. In this case the rule was fairly simple “what ever you bring needs to have the same initials that you do” (however that rule does not work in a group of people who’s names you do not know, or could easily find out), but it could have been “a type of deranged animal” or something.
OK… that’s more than enough for now, MEW!
-Kelsa
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