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 
A great game that I only heard of reading a BNL biography is called “What do you like better?”, and a typical game goes like this:
Person1: What do you like better, “Cakes” or “Handelers”.
Person2(after some thought): I prefer “Peter”.
Essentially the game is, What do you like better “B” or “C” – I prefer “D” where AB or BA, AC or CA and AD or DA are all words – the trick is coming up with good questions! (Pan) The best part is playing with a group one usually has time to come up with many more examples, like “Frying”, or one can start adding in more ridiculous ones like “Da Bears”, and “Demonium”…
What do you like better “Race” or “Keys”? – I prefer “Damom”.
What do you like better “Green” or “Shirt”? – I prefer “Chai”.
What do you like better “Phone” or “Tin”? – I prefer “Prison”.
Words can be compound or… phrases or… band names or… whatever you want – just make sure the folks you’re playing with know what your rules are! Most of the time I don’t play that the parts of the word missing have to be spelled the same, just sound the same – and that the part of the word which is missing doesn’t have to be a full word unto itself…
Another fun game is called “Ink Pink Fink” – or so it was by a friend of mine. It involves thinking two rhyming words – like “Church Perch”(not a great rhyme I know…) and then coming up with a way to describe it, but keeping it difficult – say, “Where a Bird might sit while praying”, and then it is up to the other person to guess. IF they get it right… they win… if not, they lose!
“What you might call a rat’s abode?”
“What you might call a smelly hobo?”
“The way you might feel before a meal?”
“A punk penguin relative?”
and so on and so forth…
Contact (as mentioned by Brian Campbell) is quite definitely an excellent game, and does not require 5 people – I have often played with three!
Variants on “Green Glass Door” are also fun, especially when you get ridiculous(we allways bring two things on our picnic)… say, “Armchairs and Carburators”, “Lemmings and Nucleotides”, “Elephants and Champions”…?
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A fun word game me and my folks used to play on road trips was called “think pink.”
Basicly its a guessing game, with a few twists. the Clue giver thinks up 2 words with both the same number of sylables, and they have to rhyme, ex. “fat cat” the clue giver then says “think pink” if the words have 1 sylable, “thinky pinky” for 2, “thinkity pinkity” for 3, ect. and give a clue as to what the words are, ex. “large feline”. First person to guess it gets the points, or, if no one gets it in under a minuite, the clue giver wins. Points based on number of sylables in the words.
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On extremely long band trips from the olden days of high school (man, was that really 3 years ago?), we used to play Picnic. Gameplay is simple: you only need a minimum of one other person with basic alphabetic knowledge (although 2-4 other people is optimal).
First player starts off by saying “I’m going to a picnic and I’m bringing–” this is where the alphabetic knowledge is crucial. First player has to name something beginning with an “A”, for example “an apple.”
Next player continues with the beginning, then stating the item beginning with “A”, then continues to add a “B” item. And so on and so forth with people and items.
By around letter L it gets a tad challenging, especially if you decide to not be lame and use more than one word. For example, one of the unwritten rules of the game is that for the letter “C”, you must say “the cryogenically frozen head of Walt Disney.” (Note: the word “the” can be used before the item. That was the subject of a great debate once) So rather than using say, “apple, banana” etc, be creative and use “atomic shield, bands that lack record deals but are better than any that have record deals” etc. Makes the game more challenging and hilarious.
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Botticelli is a good game for 2 upwards, but pretty complicated.
“It” thinks of a person or character (such as Mickey Mouse) and says what letter designates them (usually surname unless a single name is how they’re known; Queen Elizabeth would be E; Superman would be S but Clark Kent would be K).
eg: “OK, I’ve got an M”
Non-it people think of all sorts of famous people and characters with that letter, and assign them “cryptic questions”, which they then ask.
eg: “Are you a comedian?”
“It” then must think of an M other than who they are who fits the cryptic question.
eg: “No I’m not Spike Milligan”
But if they fail, then that person gets a “direct question” – a true/false or either/or question on who the M is:
eg: “Male Or Female?”
“Fact Or Fiction?”
(for fact) “Alive Or Dead?”
(for fiction) “first entered public awareness via Page Or Screen?”
However, the cryptic questions people are not bound by this new information.
The winner is the person who realises who it is first; if you fail on a cryptic clue, I’ll tell you who I was thinking of, and if that’s your person, I win. Alternatively, I may feel certain enough to spend a cryptic question or even a direct question asking you “Are you Mickey Mouse?”
This means that when it’s just the two of you, it’s as co-operative or competative as you feel.
there’s also this game: http://www.galactanet.com/comic/101.htm
ooh! Plus, someone earlier mentioned mafia. There’s an online, forum version that I think might be up your street – that’s what the above website leads to.
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I didn’t read through all of these, so forgive if this is a repeat. The Animal Game is popular with my school on our long distance trips.
Basically, everyone assigns themselves an animal, like I may pick rabbit and you may pick snake. The most fun is picking a really random animal, because the game is all about remembering who is what animal AND the sign they make to say it. So assuming I am rabbit and you are snake, I might put my hands up to my mouth like rabbit paws- a person who is snake could stick out their tongue and wiggle it or make a gliding movement with their arm.
The game starts with everyone beating their hands on their legs in rhythm (hit legs once, hit legs again, then clap hands together, and repeat the pattern) You need more than two people go, because the game starts with one person who does their sign in place of clapping their hands together(I would make the rabbit sign, hit their legs once, hit their legs again and THEN pick a random person’s sign who is playing and do it. Then the person whose sign was just made (you, the snake) would then have to make their sign (you, the snake) and then make another random person’s sign. (If someone else was a cat, they’d make that sign). And so on and so forth. The game doesn’t have an end because you can only get down to two or three people before it gets stupid, but as soon as someone forgets to go, wasn’t paying attention, or screws up the order (they make the wrong sign, they forget to make their sign, they forget to make the next person’s sign) then they are out. You cannot make your sign twice in a row obviously, and to make it harder, some people like to add sounds (braying for a horse, hissing for a snake) or go faster. Going faster is harder not just because you need to think faster, but the pattern starts to get harder to do between hitting one’s legs and clapping.
This was probably a more juvenile game then what you were looking for, but it’s a ton of fun once you get the hang of it.
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I just remembered one from high school, called “The Moon, the Moon, the Big Round Moon”–it hasn’t crossed my mind in at least 30 years…
The first player says, “You have to do exactly what I do.”
Then he clears his throat and says, “The Moon, the Moon, the Big Round Moon, has two eyes, a nose, and a mouth,” while drawing a face in the air.
If the next player does it exactly right, the first player tells him so. Then on to the next player. Eventually everybody “gets it” except one poor schmuck, who gets to pantomime his drawing over and over and over, getting more and more frustrated while the others tell him, “No, that’s *still* not right!!”
The thing that the schmuck [waves hand] forgets, of course, is to *clear his throat* before starting to recite. In the game I attended, the throat clearing got more and more exaggerated, until half the players sounded like they were doing Wolfman impressions. Of course, the same group of people can’t ever play [non-trivially] again, except for Alzheimer’s or lobotomies.
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Has anybody tried Silent Football? The game is very fun, but extremely complicated. (the rules are on Wikipedia)
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Game 1:
Biverbal Showdown
Players: 2+
The goal of this game is not to laugh. You can’t laugh at your own turn or anyone else’s. The way to play is put two words together and make the other person laugh. They can be any two words; any more (or fewer) will get you out. I always play where hyphenated words are only one, and proper nouns count so “Chuck Norris” is just as acceptable as “Contagious Pregnancies” is just as acceptable as “first-class executions”. It’s more effective if you understand your opponents’ sense of humour. I played this a lot between rounds during high school speech tournaments. It’s more fun with more people, but kind of sucks if you laugh when nervous and being social makes you nervous.
Game 2:
20 Questions
Players: 2+
If you seriously don’t know how to play one person thinks of something and the other person has 20 yes/no questions to guess it. However this game works best when given a specific category chosen based on something all players are knowledgeable about obscure characters from books/movies/video games are great.
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There’s a full scrabble wordlist at http://www.kisa.ca/scrabble/
What’s the result with that wordlist?
Also, I assume plurals don’t count?
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The best non-mathematical game of this type that I know is “Essences”. Can be played by any number, and the object is to stump your opponent (s) for as long as you can, while still giving logical responses. The skill is in creating a symbolic picture of your “secret person” in your responses to metaphorical questions posed by the other players.
I think of someone (living or dead, real or fictional) and then open the floor to questions. For instance, I think of Albert Einstein. The first questioner asks something like…”If this person were a toy, what toy would he/she be?” My answer in this case might be, ” A Koosh ball” (reference to Einstein’s hair). Next question might be, ” What kind of book would this person be?”, to which I might answer, “A physics textbook.”
Get the idea? The fun for the “secret holder’ is in conveying the essence of the secret identity through creative but honest answers to the questioners, while the questioners can exercise their minds by postulating questions that challenge the opponent.
First person to guess the identity of the secret person becomes the next to think of one, and the game goes on.
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My friends and I play this game on the back of buses to and from our academic competitions, so it’s mostly just to pass the time. It doesn’t really have a name but can be fun if you have enough people. It’s very simple.
The first player states a word, for example, “Hannibal”
The next player states a word that’s connected, i.e. “Julianne Moore”
The next player states another word, i.e. “Michael Moore”
And you keep repeating words until the audience thinks that the connection is either too obvious or too obscure (i.e. from ham to Rocky Horror Picture Show), and if the person who thought of the last word can’t think of another word, they lose.
It works best if you know one another quite well so you can confuse all listeners with your random words and how they relate.
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I love that someone Rickrolled this thread and no one seemed to notice.
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My friend found this (before I saw it) and we played it over gtalk, but I still beat him every time. Turns out this random dictionary.txt file I had has more less-known words than the ubuntu one 😀
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So nice to read someone else plays Ghost! I love it and have tried to get my friends to play when camping ever since reading about it in Thurber Country. (Unfortunately, all my friends think i’m a geek when i bring up Ghost and claim to be poor spellers, alas.)
Someone mentioned Thurber and someone else mentioned word strings, but: A variant in Thurber’s game is what he calls “SuperGhost”: you add on to the beginning as well as the end. Hence, if you are stuck (somehow) with U-N-D-E and do not want to add R, you can add H-U-N-D-E as in thunder, or thunderstorm, or …
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I know it’s more of a little kid game, but my cousins, siblings, and I still have a lot of fun playing “I’m going on a picnic and I am bringing…” with the alphabet. A fun little memorization game for us!
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my siblings and I used to do a similar word game (that I imagine to have invented myself) where we challenged each other to find the shortest route between two different words by adding, subtracting or changing one letter at the time (it was done in danish… I’m guessing it works in most languages with the latin alfabet) Of course it usually ended in fights about which words existed or counted…
I’ll definately try playing ghost in danish since I don’t think anyone has solved it
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Reverse pirate jeopardy – Ask a question with an answer containing at least one ‘arr’ sound. What is a pirate’s favorite sock? Argyle. 1 point for an acceptable answer. 5 additional points for the precise answer the questioner envisioned. Any logical answer with an ‘arr’ sound is acceptable, with extra points available for multiple arr’s per word and per answer. For example: What’s a pirate’s favorite transplanted ant eating mammal? Argentinian aardvark. 1 point for each word, with two points for aardvark. 3 points total, and add another 5 if it was the precise answer. Fun for the questioner and the questionee, and it gives you something to do while they process an arr-filled answ-arr.
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I never played much personally, but I think that my friends tend to do letters at both ends.
Solution #2 (which would work for me, but probably not others) would be to simply forget the ‘solutions’ if you didn’t make an effort to commit them to memory already.
Solution #3 would be to outlaw the solution words.
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Do we assume proper nouns aren’t allowed? I’m guessing the game is following scrabble rules, but can’t find that it’s actually specified anywhere in the rules. If they were allowed a quick glance at a map of Wales will set you up with plenty of options for a double L.
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One game that my sister an I alway play is Alpha – Beta.
One person think of a four letter word (with no letter repeated)
Let’s say they picked FOUR.
The second person attempts to guess that word by guessing other 4 letter words.
Lets say they guess ROTE.
The first player would reply with “One Alpha – One Beta” since “O” is the right letter in the right spot and it is an “alpha”. “R” is the right letter, but it is in the wrong place, so it a “beta”.
The second player can either, write down the words they guess and the results each word gives, or just rely on memory.
I like this game, but my sister, being the hyper competitive person that she is, would pick words like “HYMN”.
Also, in re Nathan, “Argentinian Aardvark” would merit one point per word, two points for “aar”dv”ar”k and one point for “Ar”gentinian. For a total of four points.
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Ah, word games… A thirst for which many of my friends and I have in common. Ghost entertained us for a while, until we started figuring out how to force wins. My personal favorite is mental tic tac toe, just because I usually do well with visualizing orientations. The way it works is basically, if you envision a usual tic tac toe arangement, the possible locations to put your x or o would be:
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
Thus, 1, 5, and 9 would be a winning match, as well as 2, 5, 8, and so forth. I’ve tried comming up with a three dimensional varient, such as 1a, 1b, 1c, ect., but 5b always presents a problem, allowing quick wins. Maybe if it were removed it would make the game more playable, but I haven’t had much time to experiment with it.
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Mafia is wonderful. I find it works much better in person with cards myself. I also tend to have fairly small numbers in each of the roles, but that’s personal style.
Just the other day, in fact, I ran a game of 30. We had 5 mafia, 3 sherrif, 2 doctors. Wonderful fun, really was. Up to 4 people died every round, so it went fairly quick. Oh yeah, and if the doctor(s) saved someone, then the person attacked wasn’t even mentioned. Keeps you on your toes a little.
I think that there’s something about playing in a large group with friends. Mostly because what scheming happens has to be quickly and silently agreed on, you get much more humour, etc. And a good narrator can leave people afraid to go to sleep that night, which is always fun.
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I had some interesting experiences with a variation on Psychiatrist in college. We’d try to find somebody who hadn’t played the game before, and choose a rule like “you have to answer as if you were the person N people to your left”. The additional rule was that if you answered wrong, the person you were answering for would yell “PSYCHIATRIST!” and everyone would get up and run to a new place in the circle.
The insidiousness of the game was that it usually took a very long time for the psych to figure out the pattern, and in the meantime, everyone ends up learning a lot of *interesting* things about all of the people involved. It was especially good if everyone was drinking and in a particularly saucy mood.
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No way! Someone else learned Ghost from Ghostwriter?! A year or two ago I taught my friends Ghost when we had nothing else to do! Ghostwriter was my favorite show growing up..but I can’t find it anywhere now. Do you know anywhere (besides Youtube; I’ve found some there) that has Ghostwriter episodes for download/viewing?
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I suppose you could play Ghost, but use something besides words. For example, use first names, and they all have to add up to the cast of a movie.
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I haven’t read through all the posts so I apologise if this has been mentioned – a fun game Ive played with family on a few occasions.
It’s called ‘Perpetual Notion’ and plays quite similar to ghost but a lot more subjective.
the idea is this (in the board game version, though I’m sure it can be open to interpretation), each player is dealt a hand of 7 cards with an adjective printed on it. The first player begins by placing an adjective on the table that describes a noun (usually an object) he is thinking of. Player two must now place an adjective and both adjectives on the table must describe a noun player 2 is thinking of. Play continues in this manner until a challenge is made (next paragraph) – Players are not required to stick to a noun and may change their minds as more adjectives are placed.
As a round progresses it becomes interesting trying to think of an object that will fit the description of all these accumulating adjectives. In a player places an adjective and it doesn’t look like it fits you can challenge them to provide an object – if they can’t give a *mutually agreeable* answer then the challenger gains a point and a new round begins (alt: the defeated player may be eliminated in a non board version)
Well, that’s the general gist of the game, it becomes amusing when you try to think of nouns that can acceptably fit seemingly unrelated adjectives 🙂
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The scrabble dictionary accepts jnana and mbira last. J and M are lethal letters, not solutions.
A fun variant on Ghost that I’ve been playing for a while is Goths. It is ghost accept with anagrams. Basically you take turns saying letters just like Ghost though the order they are said does not matter and the round ends when all of the letters said anagram to a word. If you ever hit a combination of letters which is not contained in any single word can challenge. The gameplay is exactly like Ghost but a lot more thought-intensive.
For example
1: W
2: H
1: B
2: K
At this point the game could either go to buckwheats, swashbuckled, or swashbuckling, so by saying T or D player 1 can lock the word onto one of the first two and guarantee a win.
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“sam Says:
December 31st, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Word Disassociation:”
There’s a really funny video on youtube, some song some guy made up. Surprisingly, it’s called Word Disassociation, by “Lemon Demon” (search for the guy who made Potter Puppet Pals)
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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?
”
This led to some confusion when I was explaining the game to someone.
Also, as someone else pointed out either Player one would lose from “Gam”.
”
The first person to either (a) spell a word, or (b) create a string that cannot be the start of a word, loses.
”
Someone else mentioned Zen for Zenith
But if the rule is you’re the first to spell a word that could not be continued, then Player one wins the “G-A-M-E” sequence with R leading to “Gamers”.
I know a lot of this depends on the word list you use, but i haven’t seen mention of any special rules about pluralization.
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Word association was always a favorite with my friends….the more obscure the association the better. However, if the association seemed too weird, someone would challenge and you would have to explain. Also, “typo dictionary” was always fun. Especially if you happened to be chatting at the time. Take any commonly misspelled word (or, if chatting, a word someone misspelled) and have all players attempt to come up with a definition. The most amusing definition (which also makes sense with root words and derivatives) wins. The one I can most remember is a conversation in which someone attempted to type roflmao and actually typed roflamo. The winning definition was something like “n. the process by which a person steals his/her ex’s favorite object and makes it into a nice red fire on the front porch.”
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Reading this list of games, I must wonder how many of those posting here are first year undergraduate mathematicians (who have a particular taste for this sort of thing) – since by second or third year most of us have become sickened at the mere thought of ever playing them again.
Except Mao. But even then, more than once a year? No.
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I just finished reading this from the bottom up, and I have to say, I’m so happy someone mentioned Questions. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is my FAVORITE play and I can’t believe I didn’t think to mention it. It also reminded me of another game my friends and I used to play when we were in high school calculus. We didn’t really have a name, but the object was to come up with an equation and proof for various every day things. Examples include an equation to prove the derivative of redheadedness is blonde (scientifically, blonde hair is a mutation of the red hair gene) and an equation which involved Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (called RAGAD for the remainder of the class) and an equation eventually ending in an undefined because of the inane nature of the book. We’re nerds like that.
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I know you made a note about this, so there’s a link :
http://www.red-dot.sg/Concept/porfolio/06/05FN/R021LM.htm
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Yet another variation on question/guessing games, we used to play the dating game. It’s more fun with multiple players, but works with only two.
Whoever is It/Guesser removes self from range of hearing while the other players come up with some sort of a theme, and each pick a “character” within that theme (like Hamlet, Horatio, Gertrude, Polonius & Ophelia, or Pool Table, Kitchen Table, Table Tennis, and Water Table).
It returns to range of hearing and has to try to guess who each person is by asking Dating Game-type questions like “What do you like to do in your spare time?” “How is your relationship with your mother?” “What’s your favorite color?” “What would we do on our first date?” “Boxers of briefs?”
It keeps guessing until everyone’s identity is established, then someone else is It. No real way of winning, but fun way to pass the time.
Other variants for Ghost could be “consonants/all letters must be in alphabetical/reverse alphabetical order”
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I was playing around with these and found that some of the second player responses can still be thwarted, for example:
quest – quesadilla
crept – crepuscule
ill – ilex
A lot of these can be responded to however, meaning that the solutions to them would have to be a lot more intricate than the ones presented at the moment.
Still, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who used words like these and those already presented here are more than satisfying.
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“Zygotic” is a winning second-player response to “Z.” I’m assuming adjectival forms are ok, since “Ghastly” is listed as a response; I’ve never played Ghost before, but I’m definitely socking it into my “bored on a road trip” file.
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of course this varies from language to language 😉
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Pax: So, if Z-Y-G-O comes up, instead of T play I, forcing “zygoid.”
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Zen is considered a proper noun by TWL and I think sowpods too. I would think Ubuntu would agree.
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Also, the single best no-paper-required game I know is called Botticelli, though it does require at least three people, preferably more, all of whom should ideally be highly nerdy.
One person (The Botticelli) pretends to be a person, living or dead, real or fictional, from anywhere in history, literature, mythology, or scripture, and announces the first letter of his or her last name or most famous name to the group. For instance, if the person were Sandro, Botticelli, The Botticelli would say, “B,” but if the person were Madonna, The Botticelli would say M.
The other players now ask The Botticelli questions about what “they” have done. For instance, someone could ask the Botticelli “Did Bach write you some music to help you get to sleep?” and the Botticelli (who is, in this case, actually Botticelli) would say “No, I’m not Brandenburg.”
If the Botticelli is unable to determine who the person in the question is, and at least one other player is able to, the person asking the question gets to ask the Botticelli one yes-or-no question, such as “Are you real?” or “Are you male?” which helps narrow down who the Botticelli could be. It’s important to note that even of the Botticelli says he’s male, the other players can still ask questions about female persons to try to stump the Botticelli and get more yes-or-no questions.
The game ends when someone guesses the identity of the Botticelli, and the winner becomes Botticelli for the next round.
While it’s possible to play this game with only two people, requiring that a third person be able to tell who’s being asked about helps prevent people from asking questions in incredibly obscure subjects. For instance, when my quiz bowl team used to play this on road trips, one girl would quite often try to use questions about the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, a subject which none of the rest of us knew anything about. Other individualized rules can be tailored to fit the group with which you are playing; our AC team eventually had to put a ban on indie rock questions, since two of the members with a freakish knowledge of the subject tended to gang up on the Botticelli and end the game too quickly.
It should be noted that this is an incredibly fun game to play on public transit; one round on the Chicago El got us applause when we disembarked.
curtmack: Huh. So it would.
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I have played Contact many times (@Brian Campbell); it’s a very fun game when you have enough people. Another slightly different game is Convergence. A group of people each thinks of a word, and says it. Then, each person tries to converge with, meaning come up with the same word as, someone else. Once everyone has a second word, they say them, and the game continues; words can never be repeated (except for convergences). If two people converge, they become a group and can discuss word choices. The game ends when everyone converges.
*goes off on random tangent about Bunny Bunny Toki Toki (search on YouTube!)*
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One of my favorites is one that I learned but hated the name, and have come to call “Mise en Scene”. One player starts out by naming something: “A rose”. The next player embellishes a little bit: “A white rose”. Players keep adding just a little bit to the scene each time: “A white rose in a vase”. “A long-stemmed white rose in a vase.” “A long-stemmed white rose in a crystal vase.” And so on. If somebody forgets something already in the scene, they are out of the game. Play continues until either there is only one player left, or until all remaining players agree that the scene is just too perfect to embellish. One of my favorite rounds I had played was “A red rose in a crystal vase on a table set for two with Louis XIV chairs, on a patio on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean just before sunset, as Sasha Lazard quietly plays on the stereo.” And I had to go and forget the Louis XIV chairs.
If you’d like something more physical, there’s Me Switch, a game for two. The object is to trick your opponent into making the same gesture as you. The three gestures are holding your hands angled just above the eyebrows, second is holding your arms in an X in front of you, and the last is holding your arms in an L in front of you with one arm straight up and the other horizontal touching the vertical arm’s elbow. One person starts out by calling “Me, switch!” Both players snap into one of the three gestures on “Switch”. If both players make different gestures, the other player calls “Me, switch!”. If both players make the same gesture, the caller calls again. Three matches in a row wins it for the caller.
Another cerebral one is Bound For Hell. It’s sort of Zendo or Eleusis that doesn’t require equipment. One player, It, is bound for Hell and wants to bring everyone along. It thinks of a secret rule for items that can be brought to Hell. The other players take turns naming things that they think they can bring to Hell. It says if they can bring the item to Hell or not, and if they couldn’t bring it should name something similar that could be brought along. For example:
A banana? No, but you can bring an apple.
A bicycle? No, but you can take along roller skates.
You could bring along zucchini, but not a cucumber.
Volkswagens and Hondas aren’t allowed in Hell, but Cadillacs and Hummers are.
In this case, it would be anything that has a doubled letter.
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My brother and I came up with a word-only game, to pass the time on long road trips and on family vacations. Since there were only 2 of us, it was back-and-forth, but there can be any number of players, each person getting one turn. The first person thinks of a word in the English language, or your native language (no foreign languages, acronyms, proper nouns, or 2 and 3 letter words). They say this word aloud. The next person has to think of a new word that begins with the last letter of the previous word, as in this example: A said “Pizza”, and B said “Apple”, and A said, “Elephant”, and B said, “Telephone” and A said, “Eraser”… No words can be reused, and the first person to either be unable to come up with a new word, say a word that begins with the incorrect letter, or reuses a used word loses. You can use a score if none of you are particularly eloquent, or have large vocabularies.
-AGURISH
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You can play a game of vocal Scattegories, in which one person chooses a letter and another player chooses a category. you take turns saying something in that category beginning with that letter. a very goof game for from two to basically infinite people.
Decide on a time limit for each turn, so it doesnt go on forever. when you say a word that has already been said, or doesnt fit the category, or you run out of time, your out. play continues until only one player remains.
good categories include Movie, songs, actors, food, beer brands, Insults (my favorite), etc. get creative. great game to play with friends while drinking on a beach or something.
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I have been playing this game with my girl since you put this up. She doesn’t know my strategy. Or, YOUR strategy, rather. I haven’t lost once. But we have spent 3 hours, 52 minutes and 42 seconds playing this. And a lot of the time, i bluffed her that equivalent is “E-Q-U-I-V-E*-L-E-N-T” That E gets her. But not really. I owe her 20 bucks because she figured out that it wasn’t spelled like that.
I was so into that lie, that i believed it myself!
We do songs, and with our combined iTunes (me:10,047>her:9407) We never stop until I run out of batteries!
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i dont know the name my family and I always just called it the word game.
you choose a subject and start with the letter A you respond by saying a word that starts with A and has to do with the subject.you just go around the circle until someone cant think of a word. That person is out. Las man/woman standing wins.
ex: subject-animals
p1-A ant
p2-B bear
and so on
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Oh, man! I just lost the game.
One variation on Picnic that we played was A My Name is Alice. The first person starts by saying “A my name is (a name that begins with A) and my husband’s/wife’s name is (a male/female name that begins with A). We come from (a place that begins with A) with a truck full of (an object that begins with A).” The next person starts “A her name is (A name)” and repeats what the first person says, then says “B my name is (a name that begins wth B)…”
Or, to demonstrate:
Person 1: “A my name is Alice and my husband’s name is Alfred. We come from Alberquerque with a truck full of apples.”
Person 2: “A her name is Alice and her husband’s name is Alfred. They come from Alberquerque with a truck full of apples. B my name is Bobby and my wife’s name is Beatrice. We come from Boise with a truck full of bagels.”
Person 3: “A her name is Alice and her husband’s name is Alfred. They come from Alberquerque with a truck full of apples. B his name is Bobby and his wife’s name is Beatrice. They come from Boise with a truck full of bagels. C my name is Cathy and my husband’s name is Cesar. We come from Croatia with a truck full of croutons.”
It’s a good game with a big group – we used to play around the dinner table at my grandparents’ house, which would usually mean that there were ten people’s names, locations and cargo to remember by the time it got back to you. It’s actually more difficult with two people, as you don’t have the visual association of looking at your Aunt Brooke and remembering that she said “D my name is DeeDee and my husband’s name is Daedalus, we come from Durango with a truck full of dinosaurs” or something equally outrageous.
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“One, Two, Three” is a wonderful cooperative game for car journeys, which could also be described as “The Game of Convergence in the Space of Words”.
With just two players, the game goes as follows:
Each player thinks of a word or phrase – some idea or object.
When each player has thought of a word, they both together say ‘One, two, three’, and then together each say their word. We now have two words. Next, the players each try to think of a new word that associates with the two starting words. When both players have thought of something, they again together say ‘One, two, three’ and then together each say their new word.
Either:
The two new words are the same! Everyone wins!
or:
We have two new different words.
If we get different words then again the players try to think of a new word to link the two latest ideas (no backtracking to previously used words allowed). And so we continue, trying to converge at some point to the same word.
A fuller description of the game, and the multiplayer version “One, Two, Many” here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A906644
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My brother and I used to play this really weird memorization game where we would name random words (building up a recited list) for about an hour or until somebody messed up the list. Then at the end, we’d have to explain the associative mental image to the other person.
For example, if the words were “sheep”, “umbrella”, and “rain”, someone might imagine a sheep grabbing on to an umbrella and flying Mary Poppins style(TM) before it starts raining.
While the mental images don’t really assist in choosing a winner, they tend to be quite fun. This was great in long car rides until my sister threatened to kill us with sticks.
Our (by far) favorite car trip game was the license plate game. Given the three letters of a license plate, the first person to come up with a word that uses all three letters in the order that they appear on the plate (but not necessarily consecutively) wins. Proper nouns are illegal, and smaller words that are found slightly later are considered “better.” There really is no clear winner, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun. Even when I’m driving these days I can’t help but keep doing it. (E.g. RQS could be “ReQuiSition” or “ReQuireS” etc)
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I forgot to mention another game, the name of which I can’t remember, but which I will call “Dictionary.” One person says a word, and the other person has to tell whether or not it’s truly a word, and if yes, give a tentative definition. If player 2 says it isn’t a word when it is, (s)he loses two points. If (s)he says it is a word when it isn’t, (s)he loses one point, and if (s)he gives an incorrect definition, (s)he loses another point. Or you could play it like me and just try to come up with silly definitions to words you’ve never heard before.
Some days I swear I must be a bot because I can never get the goddamn anti-bot words.
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