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 
I know it’s a minor quibbling point, but you should perhaps expand your dictionary.
ao- is countered with aoudad, a sheep-like African animal.
blim- is countered with blimey, a British interjection.
crep- is countered with crepance, an injury in a horse’s leg.
gher- is countered with gherao, an encirclement.
il- is countered with ilmenite, a weakly magnetic mineral.
ny- is countered with nybble. You know.
oz- is countered with ozalid, a printing process.
pneumo- is countered with pneumobacillus, a pneumonia bacteria.
ques- is countered with quesadilla, a delicious treat.
ry- is countered with rynd, a millstone support.
sque- is countered with squeteague, any of the weakfish.
twic- is countered with twichild, a person undergoing another childhood.
uvul- is countered with uvulitis, an inflammation of the uvula.
xy- is countered with xyst, an open portico.
yi- is countered with yikker, to utter sharp little cries.
h, j, m, and z were uncounted.
d, e, f, k l, v and w have correct solutions, as far as I can see.
It should be solvable, though. Incidentally, I used http://wordnavigator.com for this.
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My brothers play anagram ghost. If all the letters accumulated anagram to a word, then the person who played the last letter loses.
Example: YYZYSG anagrams to syzygy: Player 2 loses.
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Zig doesn’t count as a word?
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Y-O-U A-R-E A C-O-C-K
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Once when I was in school, a teacher taught us an interesting word game which may have been described above but I haven’t read every post in-depth. I can’t remember the name of it for the life of me, but it’s a game where you learn how to play by not knowing the rules.
You have a person administering this game. And the point of the game is to find out the rules of the game by asking questions about it. The players ask yes/no questions or make guesses about the rules until somebody gets it right. The main problem is that for obvious reasons you can only play it once with any given group.
For those of you wanting to play the game, the rules are as follows: If the last word of the question begins with a letter from ‘A’ to ‘M,’ then the answer to the question is “Yes.” (regardless of what the question is) If the last word of the question begins with a letter from ‘N’ to ‘Z,’ then the answer to the question is “No.”
Plain and simple.
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The strip “Bass”… is it possible to devise such a device? I would love to have it (oh, only if I was not a chemical engineer)!
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Re: Brianna
Seattle Public Library has some episodes on VHS. Maybe your library does too?
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Have you considered playing Ghost with Regular Expression syntax? It could be an interesting twist.
Start with a set of words and a regular expression, then each player adds either a letter or any operator except * to it. Once an operator such as [ ] is created, letters may not be added inside it.
Initial State > ‘.*’
Player 1 > ‘r.*’
Player 2 > ‘r.*x’
Player 1 > ‘re.*x’
Player 2 > ‘[re].*x’
Player 1 > ‘[re].*ux’ Matches efflux, redux, reflux, roux
Player 2 > ‘[re].*lux’ Matches efflux, reflux
Player 1 > ‘[re].*flux’ Aha! Still only matches efflux, reflux
Player 2 > Loses, because he cannot find a way to add to the above expression without reducing the results to one or zero.
Something like http://visca.com/regexdict/ might be useful for players whose head starts hurting at the very mention of regex, although this particular dictionary appears to use some nonstandard syntax. Very experienced regex users could potentially play on pen and paper, but I would imagine even this would make a quite difficult twist on the game, and solely mental play would be more or less impossible.
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I can’t believe nobody has mentioned Penis.
I started skimming after the first hundred comments or so (man I’m bored), but I don’t think anybody mentioned “Pick a category, name a member of the category beginning with each letter of the alphabet.” I’ve mostly played it collaboratively, but even then there gets to be a certain amount of competition to come up with obscure or otherwise worthy entries.
The geekiest car game I’ve ever played was with a former college roommate and coworker, in which we tried to stump each other with networks trivia questions. We may have been on our way to Defcon at the time…
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v.v in hindsight the brackets didn’t need escaping backslashes. So much for my l337 c0d3r ski11z…
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We never had a word for it, but this was a good one at slumber parties or in the car. You name a category (like food, or cars, whatever) and go through the alphabet naming items from that category (such as apples, bananas, cherries…). Whoever can’t think of a next word looses.
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I’ve always been amused by a variant of 20 questions in which the questions are unlimited and the round goes on until someone guesses the noun chosen by the person who is “it” or all the players give up. It’s great to use really specific things like “Dr. Stolte’s saxophone” or abstract like “the city of Edmonton”… And of course there are no hints, and only questions that may be answered with “yes” or “no”.
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I know your comic is humor based but when I searched for died in a blank accident, blogging turned up more results than skydiving on google, this upsets me I guess, but I feel better by writing this. Have a good day.
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We just started playing a game called Subsume- best with 10+ people. (Requires scraps of paper + pens, so doesn’t quite fit the requested category) Everybody comes up with a name for themselves, real or fictional- anything from actors to movie characters to other people in the room is allowed. They write it on a scrap of paper. Someone who is not playing reads through all these scaps aloud twice (and only twice). On your turn, you try to guess someone elses name: “Are you Santa Claus?” If you are right, you ‘subsume them’- they come over and join your team, and you can now pool your memories and insights, and you get to go again. If you are wrong, it is their turn. If you guess the name of somebody who has already subsumed several people, that whole team comes over and joins you. The goal is to gather everyone to your team without having your name be guessed.
Winning tends to require many skills- memorization, people-reading, and chosing a name either that no-one associates with you, or ideally that everyone forgets.
We played that if someone comes up with a really complicated name, ‘close enough’ counts, so you can’t put a ridiculously long name just to prevent people from being able to remember it exactly.
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There’s an interesting game I read about in a book called New Rules for Classic Games by R Wayne Schmittberger. This book has a whole chapter called ‘paper, pencil, and no-equipment games’, so you could look for it on a used books website. Ghost is in there, as are some variants, and a number of other games.
Anyway, the game is finger baseball, a variant on Rock Paper Scissors. It’s a two-player game in which the two players alternate between being the ‘pitcher’ and the ‘batter’. Like in RPS, the gameplay mechanism is saying ‘one, two, three’ and throwing out a gesture. In this game, you have the choice between any of 1-5 fingers.
The pitcher’s objective is to throw a different number of fingers than the batter, while the batter, of course, is trying to throw the same number as the pitcher. If the numbers match, the batter gets on base as determined by this table:
1 finger – single
2 fingers – double
3 fingers – triple
4 fingers – home run
5 fingers – walk
As in baseball, there are three bases and home plate, and a hit will put the runner on the appropriate base. Any runners on base at the time of a hit advance the same number of bases as the ‘hitter’ does, unless the hitter gets a walk, in which case the runner on base doesn’t advance unless forced to, since only one runner can occupy a base at a time. Example, if there was a runner on second and the other bases were empty, a single would advance the runner to third, any other hit would advance him to home, scoring a run. A walk, however, wouldn’t advance him. Each runner getting to home scores a run/point for the batter.
If the numbers thrown don’t match, it’s an out for the batter. Once the hitting side gets three outs, the players switch roles. Play as many innings as you which, although nine is standard as in baseball. I really enjoy this game, as it adds a little more depth and some actual strategy to a game like RPS, while still retaining its psychological battle nature and easy-to-play-ness.
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I used to play a different version of the dictionary game mentionned by Embrodak :
One player chooses an obsure word in the dictionary (so first difference, we only play with existing words), and all the other players have to come up with a definition for this word. All the definitions are then read and players vote for what they think is the “Best” definition.
All the fun of the game lies in what you call the “Best” definition: You can come up with obviously wrong but funny and original definitions that will give you popularity votes, or come up with complicated (and thus realistic) definition that people will believe are the real definition for this word.
Anyway, the player with the more votes scores and chooses the word for the next round.
Thanks a lot to all the readers of this thread for their game ideas that will sure come handy during road trips…
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I’ve been playing this game with friends since my uncle taught me how on a car trip nearly ten years ago now. Only our version has a few variations.
For one, a single game continues for several rounds, and the losing player of each game gets a letter in GHOST, akin to HORSE for basketball. As soon as you spelled “GHOST” you were out, last player left is the winner.
We would play with up to five players sometimes, and we had a “continue” rule. If you ended a word, but wanted to pass it on to the next player to spell a different word that starts with the same letters, you would say your letter and then “continue.” So we had a no plural rule so that people wouldn’t just say “S” to shift the loss to the next player (even plurals that weren’t just an “S” at the end were against the rules, unless they were collective like “moose” and other obvious exceptions). Also if you said continue and there was no word that could be spelled with those letters besides the one spelled already, you’d probably just get challenged and get your letter in “GHOST”. In multiplayer matches, if the challenger was wrong and there is a further word that isn’t a plural, he’s the one who gets the letter.
All the other rules are spot on as you explained them.
I knew about khaki and llama, those still work even with the continue rule, but not in three-player, which it most often was. A few of the others on that list do too, but I never bothered to look up ALL of the auto-win words for second player. Continues really open the window to a lot more word options, and make the games not only a lot longer but harder to predict, especially with more than two people playing.
Either way, it was a good way to pass long bus trips to cross country and track meets and such. Having no dictionary handy was only a minor setback.
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I just learned about the game (being a linguistics graduate-student no less), and maybe I don’t quite get it, but isn’t it very easy to not make clusters that are not the start of a word?
I mean, in English, the clusters that can be formed at the beginning of syllables are very limited. If you know basis phonological feature theory, you can’t make any mistakes. Of course there are lexicalized exceptions and loanwords, but still.
I guess not everyone likes to know about phonological feature 😉
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This isn’t relevant to the issue at hand, but I wanted to note:
Using the research methodology described in Friday’s comic, you have just made knitting and blogging much more dangerous.
Thanks, jerk.
— ACS
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Not only has he made knittinh and bloggin more dangerous, he’s made snake charming and looking for snake charming far more dangerous!
There’s currently over 1,600 google results of “died in a snake charming accident” and not only that, google’s first result is in fact a web trying to install some “setup.exe” in your computer 😉
Now that’s even more horrifying than the switch labeled “macarena”
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you could play mental tic tac toe…agree on how you’re naming spaces and keep it all in your head…makes it much harder…or my personal favorite is mental three dimensional tic tac toe…use a 3×3 cube…good times 🙂
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Another game to mention, not exactly suitable for the situation you described but fun none the less. Ideal for a group of people say 5+ drinking or at some kind of party.
Its called the Garden Gate, its a very pointless game.
One person is the Gate keeper, at the start of the game they make up some arbitrary rule about who they will let through the garden gate.
Each person in the group will get to ask or say why they think they can go through the garden gate, and the gate gatekeeper will answer honestly if they can go though or not, but the reason they give will be a lie. Eg.
Rule : Only allow people holding there drink when they ask.
Player : I can go through the garden gate because i can pick the lock
Gatekeeper : Im sorry you can’t because there isnt a lock.
The main idea of the game is that the players keep an eye out and try to work out what the real reason is and guess when they think they know for sure. Most of what is said is a load of rubbish, because of that its great to get someone new to join in and not explain to them how the game works. They will work it out after a bit if its not a too complex rule.
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I like 20 questions.
More abstract: French Toast
Player 1 thinks of a secret something, say, Napoleon.
Player 2: Is it more like French Toast or Pancakes?
Player 1: French Toast
Player 2: French Toast or a dog?
Player 1: Dog.
Player 2: Dog or watch?
Player 1: Dog.
Player 2: Dog or Harry Potter?
player 1: Harry Potter.
It goes like that for a very long time.
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This game generally emerges out of sponteniety, as opposed to being organized beforehand, and is more likely to produce satisfactory results when played with 2-4 players.
It starts when someone says a long word, to which one could conceivably not know the definition. They then say “oh, is that where…” and proceed to define another word which sounds similar, never having said the word they were defining. Another player then defines another word which sounds similar to the previously defined one, again without saying the word itself. Continue until no one can think of a response to a word, and that is the game. You can make the last player to say a word the “winner,” I guess, but the game really doesn’t necessitate such competition.
For understanding’s sake, here is an example game:
A: How Sanguine!
B: Sanguine? Is that the flightless antarctic bird?
C: No, I think it’s the emulsifier found in fruits, that they add extra of to thicken jelly.
A: I thought it was the microscopic organisms that live all over in the oceans.
C: Maybe it’s when you put a plaque on something.
B: That is so not a word.
As you can see, this one ran a little while, and then died when someone called the use of a non-word. You can breeze right on by these, if you like to play the game enough, and if they are believable. In case you didn’t catch the words used, they were, in order, Sanguine, Penguin, Pecten, Plankton, and Plaquen. I have played games of this with a good group of three people for over half and hour, starting with Soliloquy, and ending with Amsterdam. Real mental workout.
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What about mouse? I can’t see any other words that are mou or mous.
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I’ve played this before but we call it Pig.
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Why dont you just make a rule in ghost that you have to play at lest two letters and the previous two must form a word, or maybe up it to 3?
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Sam: Mouse isn’t on there because player 1 chooses the third letter. According to this he would play Z on an M-O (to force mozzarella, the only word in the English language that begins with MOZ, and a win for him). He wouldn’t play U, which forces mouse (a loss for him).
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Actor/Movie game.
The first person names the actor and movie they were in.
The next player has to pick another actor from that movie and name a different movie that they were in.
Then it goes back and forth until someone is stumped.
You can’t use the same actor or movie twice in one game.
Ex:
Person 1: Harrison Ford – Blade Runner
Person 2: Daryl Hannah – Splash
Person 1: Tom Hanks – Saving Private Ryan
Person 2: Matt Damon – The Departed
Person 1: Mark Wahlberg – Shooter
Person 2: Uhhhh…Crap
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Wait, you can’t just go ‘import ghost’ in Python? What a let down.
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Here’s a game I made up out of sheer boredom waiting for outrounds to get over at Millard North Debate. Technically it requires two quarters which are distinguishable, but that’s not a tall order because of the state quarters.
Put simply: One player spins their quarter. Then the other player spins theirs. If the two coins obviously won’t hit each other, the first player picks their quarter up again and spins it. And so on.
Once the quarters hit, if both quarters go down (they can still be wobbling, so long as they are obviously no longer spinning and maintaining balance with the inertia thereof), whoever’s quarter stops wobbling last scores one point. If they are both still up (still spinning), the play is still in action and the next player to spin does so normally.
If one goes down and the other stays up, then the “up” quarter scores two points. However, as long as that “up” quarter is still spinning, the other player can pick up their quarter and spin it again, in an attempt to hit the other quarter before it naturally goes down (where you define the line between “spinning” and “wobbling” is personal preference). They may only do so once.
If they hit, and both quarters go down, no points are scored. If they do not hit, then the player of the “up” quarter scores 2 points as usual. If one quarter is up and the other is down, then a “counter” has been scored – the player of the quarter that just went down picks it up and attempts to spin it, just as before, but this time, it is worth 3 points. Each additional counter adds one point to the total.
Finally, however the play ends, the player who scores picks up their quarter and begins the next play.
There can be some variation – it’s probably best to have someone calling penalties, which are made up at first but eventually become solidified amongst your group of friends – but that’s up to you. The game ends at 20 points, 10 minutes, or whenever everyone gets bored.
It’s also possible to play with nickles, but dimes and pennies should be reserved only for the best of the elite – it’s really hard to spin them with just your thumb and forefinger.
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I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Quantum Fingers yet. The downside is that you need at least three people; the upside is that you need absolutely no equipment beyond your own hands.
Briefly, at the beginning of the game all your fingers exist in a state of superposition. The winning player is the first to collapse the waveform and uniquely determine the location of every finger in the game.
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My dad and I play the aptly-named “three-syllable-word-game.” It is very simple; it can go on for hours and has. First, one player chooses a letter (for illustration purposes, it will be ‘p’). The player take turns saying words that begin with the letter. The words must have at least three syllables and root words cannot be re-used; for example, Player1 says ‘pneumonia,’ Player2 cannot say ‘pneumatic.’ Family fun for hours!
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Inspired by you, I solved Superghost: http://squing.blogspot.com/2008/01/first-player-wins-superghost.html
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The obvious solution is to grow the dictionary so that the relevant game tree is too large to commit to memory. If there are no words apropriate, create them.
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A few games that no one’s mentioned.
Dead Nerd:
Not so much a game as a way of messing with people. Two players both familiar with Dead Nerd start the game. The first player says “dead.” The second player says “nerd.” Repeat, until one of the players’ eyes light up and they say “I win.” The player who lost then says “dead,” and the game repeats. The winner is whoever says “I win” first, and the job of the losing player is to make it seem as if his loss was really obvious. If played in the right company, you can lead people on for quite a while until they realize that there’s absolutely no criteria for winning. And at that point, it becomes fun to just play Dead Nerd for the pure absurdity of it.
Four Words:
Similar to a previously mentioned game, but not goal-oriented. One player picks a four letter word. The next player swaps out one letter to make another four letter word. Continue in this fashion until someone can’t think of another four letter word. Example with three players: P1 says, “dour.” P2 says, “pour.” P3 says, “pout.” P1 says, “port.” P2 says, “porn.” P3 says, “corn.” And so on.
The Rhyming Game:
This is easily my favorite word game, and is similar to Contact, but has a much different feel. One player picks a word, which all the other players have to guess. Then he picks another word that rhymes with it. E.g. (stack) “I’m thinking of a word that rhymes with ‘jack.'” Then the first player asks, “Is it something you put under thumbs.” “No, it’s not a tack.” The second player asks, “Is it what the big orange gun in Unreal Tournament shoots?” “No, it’s not flack.” And so on. The real point of the game is to come up with the most creative guesses you can.
The Euphemism Game:
This is an excellent party game for those not easily offended, although you can only really play it once. The point of the game is to pick some term that has many euphemisms, such as “penis” or “vagina” and then go in a circle and say one such euphemism. If you can’t think of one, you’re out. You’ll be amazed at just how many people come up with, and how funny they are.
Thank you Al for “What do you like better?” and CosmicJester for Bound for Hell.
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My family played Ghost and Superghost all the time when I was growing up.
My wife Quinn, who is not a huge fan of the game but who is very patient, agreed to play Ghost when my son suggested it yesterday. She immediately defeated me with AO, which I had to challenge.
A little later she admitted to printing out this list, which I hadn’t seen, and carrying it around in her purse just waiting for one of us to want to play!
We each looked at the list for a while, and then my son wanted to play again…
Me: A.
Him: O. (chuckling)
Me: R.
Him: T! (gloating)
Me: I.
All: …. OH SNAP
I see other commenters have mentioned AORTIC, but I wanted to tell my story anyway.
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Bad news… I do believe word games like this are part of that nasty PSPACE-complete group. I haven’t actually done the analysis, so I may be wrong, but similar games are usually used to teach about PSPACE.
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I can’t believe that nobody here knows Sticks!
you begin a game by pointing both index fingers at your challenger. They respond by doing likewise. You now tap one of you challenger’s hands with one of your fingers. they now must hold up 2 fingers, because 1+1=2. they then take their turn, making you add whatever number of fingers they tapped you with. If your hand ends up with over 5 fingers, it dies. when both hands die, you lose.
Variants:
You can forfeit a turn to transfer 1 finger from 1 hand to another. This can be used to revive hands.
A hand only dies when it has exactly 5 fingers, otherwise, the “damage carries over e.g. 2+4=6, 6-5=1, 1 finger remaining.
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It seems like the second player can with with HYBRIDISE. It’s good for the second player because he/she can force the game in this direction by picking Y after the first player picks H.
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A game my brother and I used to play on long car trips, that has not yet been mentioned, was a game we called simply “Life”. The game would be started spontaneously, without prior agreement. The initiator would simply blurt out, “[Unwitting Player B], I’ve been thinking: Life? Life is a lot like [random pbject].”
To which the only immediate responses allowed were:
1. “Well, [Player A], I too think that life is like [same random object], because [explanation].” (in this case, Player B has parried Player A’s attack and is allowed to counter with a new simile using a new random object)
2. “Well, [Player A], I simply cannot understand how [same random object] is like life at all.” (Player B has failed to come up with an off-the-cuff response and is challenging Player A to do better. Should Player A succeed, Player B has lost. This gives the advantage to the initiator, since she has had time prior to think of a response befor posing the first question. If Player A fails anyhow, Player B wins the challenge.)
3. “Shut the hell up.” (In this instance, Player B has forfeited the round without further engagement.)
The only way an explanation is refused is if it patently fails in its objective to a) be a proper analogy or b) be too amusing to veto.
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One suggestion I haven’t seen suggested yet:
Starting H-I-G- automatically results in a win for player one (Higgle, Higgling, or High are the only words available on any list I could find), while H-I-J can be defeated by Hijinks (there’s no singular version of this word, so player two doesn’t lose before the s).
@Gremlin: Player two would lose when he input the D, spelling HYBRID and thus completing a word.
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A great game is similar to the gatekeeper game described above is Picnic.
One person comes up with a rule as to what will be allowed for a picnic, and than give an example of something he or she can bring and something he or she can’t bring. EX: I can bring coffee, but I can’t bring tea. The other players are forced to think about the qualities of the items have been said to see if they can figure out the rule. As people guess, you have to synthesize any new information you have in order to try and discover the rule. Example: Juice, Yes, Gin and Tonic, No, baseball, Yes, bat, No. The round ends when everyone figures out what the rule was (things whose names are spelled with a t aren’t allowed in).
These rules can really be related to anything. It could like the previous answer, have to do with the spelling of the words, but you can have rules that are based on the way you ask the question, or could have rules that relate to physical properties of the words you’re saying.
It entertained a bus full of college age students on a performance tour of Ireland the entire length of the trip.
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I’m a big fan of playing at questions ala Ros. & Guil. are Dead, but that one has been mentioned already.
So, I’ll go with the other one I’ve got.
To toss another variation on the games involving movies is one that came out of a school trip to a music competition back in high school (creatively titled “The Movie Game”). Basically, a third party (or an external input) determines the starting letter. Player 1 thinks of a movie title starting with that letter. Player 2 must think of a movie title that starts with the first letter of the last word (eg: The DaVinci Code > C). If the title is only one word, Player 2 must think of a movie title that starts with the last letter (eg: Serenity > Y). That’s the basic game mechanic.
Hard rules were:
A) No repeats (obviously)
B) Only one “pass” allowed per person or team (number of people/teams generally 2 but melee is not unusual), the play continues on that letter back to the other player – so always try to be ready.
C) As per a Card Catalog: A, An, and The don’t count
Then sprinkle ground rules added as per your tastes/tolerances. The basic ones we used were:
1) Sequels generally don’t count, just go with the franchise (eg: Star Trek counts for 1 movie, not 10, and the next movie must start with T)
2) Sequels do count if they’re not simply renumbered, but are essentially whole new titles – not subtitled, and again, not numbered or known by a number. Generally folks ruled that the Indiana Jones movies counted, but Star Wars(es)/Trek(s) didn’t.
3) “Made for TV Movies” don’t count (eg: the Law & Order “movie”) – too hard to prove out and too arbitrary a classification.
4) Be reasonable when it comes to movies made for children’s franchises. Movies, not “home video releases” (eg: Big Bird Goes to China, not Barney Catches a Cold).
5) If it hasn’t hit theatres yet, it doesn’t count. I don’t care how many commercials there are, how much marketing there is, how soon it is until it comes out, or even how many snakes are on this dang plane.
6) When it comes to anime, it should pass some sort of “reasonable person” test. What could everyone (or most everyone) in the game be reasonably expected to have heard of? Translation: YMMV.
7) No “adult films” – their titles are excessively arbitrary, excessively derivative, excessive in number, and … well they’re just excessive and generally inappropriate for the game.
8) “Classic Novels” or “Great Works of Literature” or “Famous Broadway Shows/Musicals” or “Famous Plays” are allowed as, at some point or another, they’ve probably been made into movies – they may not have done well or be popular, but it most probably happened, so you might as well count it.
9) Documentaries generally don’t count. They’re not exactly what you would typically call movies, and after a certain point there are too many to fathom. If a documentary was released as a movie (eg: March of the Penguins, An Inconvenient Truth), that would be allowed to count. Again, the “reasonable person” test applies (did you need a ticket to see it when it came out?).
10) Numbers are strange when determinining the next movie. Again, YMMV, so just one simple example: Fantastic Four > F, or > 4, or > a number starting with 4.
In the event of a challenge, find a third party to see if they have heard of it. If you decide to use IMDB as a sort of Scrabble dictionary, have someone else do it so that the user doesn’t get the added benefit of seeing all these other titles on the screen. Generally, it’s good to play with a “ref” – not too hard, it’s usually a lot of fun to watch and you’ll typically have the game grow from a duel to a skirmish.
If there are two passes in a row, decide how to handle it (both lose, both win, new random letter and keep going, etc).
Or, of course, you could simply play for time – see how long you can keep going.
Enjoy.
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me/my family play ghost quite often:
the way to de-rig the situation is to play so you can add letters to the beginning of the word. this way LL can become ULL, and change the flow of the game.
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I particularly enjoyed playing a 3-or-more-players variant of “Questions” where non-sequitur questions were allowed. Also, when asking the question, the player must direct it to another player (by either pointing or facing him ostensibly). The penalty for hesitation, repetition or non-questioning was drinking something.
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Thanks curtmack!
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You’ve been caught playing Half-Life AGAIN! 🙂
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