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 
how about the ATION game? you go around (or back and forth, if there are only two players) naming words that end in -ation. no passing. it gets surprisingly hard! unless you’re playing on public transit, in which case you can cheat and look at the posters. not that i’d ever do that.
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Hey Gremlin, Hybridise (hybridize?) wouldn’t work because player 2 would spell out “Hybrid” first, and so would lose. Oh, and I think that it would be interesting to play with something like Websters rather than the Ubuntu dictionary, because then words like “Aortic” would be valid.
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“A-O” is not a winning play for the second player on “aorta”. However, “A-O-R-T” is.
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Lyric game!
I don’t nearly get to play it often enough.
You recite a line (or two, or four, depending on how easy you’re making it) from a song, and the next person has to use one of the words in reciting his own lyrics. You can’t use prepositions, conjunctions, articles, or other bitch-ass nondistinctive words. You can use short distinctive words, though, like war.
It helps if the players like the same style of music so they can tell if someone is just making up lines. You can even play all in one artist, as I do with Tori Amos.
It looks like this:
1- vultures in my garden // figures that i know them
2- got me a pretty pretty garden // a pretty garden
3- girls, old bags that say // she was so pretty
4- the office girls were all burning // their poetry
5- meet me in phoenix // i’ll be burning til then
And so on.
There are two ways to lose. In the example above, if you tried to use “still // pretty good year”for turn 4, you’d lose because you can’t just turn the same word around again and again. You also lose for making up bullshit lyrics or misquoting lyrics, which is why it is helpful to know the same musical artists.
There is only one way to legitly win, and it’s tricky. It’s to box the other player in with lyrics that have only nonusable words. The only example I’ve found in Tori Amos so far is “and it’s time time time // and it’s time time time”. “And” doesn’t count because it’s a conjunction, “it’s” is one of the bitch-ass words, and “time” is the distinctive word that can’t be turned around again.
For more fun, play while drunk and sing the lyrics.
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I play Ghost like JP (31 Dec., 3:03) does. Additionally, you can add letters inside the sequence, not just to the ends. You still have to have a word that contains the exact sequence (e.g. you could use UNDER for UND but couldn’t use STUNNED).
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One way you could spice up Ghost is to make it phonetic. It really only impacts the vowels and silent letters, but it forces you to think in a different mode. And it especially lends itself to being a verbal-only game.
So you could start with a long O, then player two could follow with an N, and the resulting word could be honorous, or only, but not honesty or ontology because they use the wrong O sound.
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A game that my brother and I used to play was the “i’m going on a trip game.” The first person would start by saying “I’m going on a trip and i’m bringing x” where x is any object. The next person has to say “I’m going on a trip and I’m bringing x and y.” where x is the object from the first one and y is a new object. A sample game would go like this:
Player 1 (1): I’m going on a trip and I’m bringing an elephant.
Player 2: (2): I’m going on a trip and I’m bringing an elephant and a suitcase.
1: I’m going on a trip and I’m bringing an elephant, a suitcase, and a computer.
2: I’m going on a trip and I’m bringing an elephant, a suitcase, a computer, and a brush.
And so on until one person forgets an object. It’s lots of fun with anything from large groups of people to just 2 people.
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When I was little my dad and I made up a game called the ‘What’ game. In the course of normal conversation you had to try _not_ to say the word ‘what’. Whoever did became It, and had to get the other person to say ‘what’. (Like verbal tag)
This worked great because you start having an interesting, random conversation and then get distracted – though I’m not sure if it’s as fun for adults, I haven’t played in years-
You could also play the game with another word, like rhinoceri, if it is a word you use frequently ( ;
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Nomic,
Game of rules (and changing them).
It seems like rule 102 is one of the first to go, followed shortly there after by 107. This the $#!^ gets weird. 😛 🙂
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/nomic.htm#initial%20set
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The version of ghost I play is that you don’t lose if you end the word, the round just ends and the next player starts a new word. The only time anyone can lose is through a challenge (either the challenger or the challenge-ee). However, when someone loses they just earn a point. The first person to a certain score loses. All of this means that no one can be forced to lose because of the letters chosen previously (they can just end the word). Winning and losing depends on one’s vocabulary.
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Hi!
I actually remember that episode of Ghostwriter.
You say there are no winning responses for the second player after a J.
Does the Ubuntu word list not have JNANA?
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GHOST
We play a variation of Ghost that works rather well and is probably very difficult to solve.
On your turn, you can add your letter to either end of the current string.
Additionally, you could play with the rule that a player can call “reverse” for their turn and reverse the current string. A “reverse” may not be called immediately after another “reverse.”
Have fun!
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This one’s very easy, but takes more than three people. It’s simply counting. One person starts with “one” and you continue counting. You can’t prompt, make eye contact, or otherwise guide the other players into who should say the next number. If two people say a number at the same time, start over. If there is a pause, restart. This game gets increasingly difficult with more people!
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Allow place names as well. Then L followed by L may lead to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch instead of llama.
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A long time ago I discovered a variant in Games Magazine called Halfabet. Each player gets half of the alphabet and can only say letters from their half. Like xghost, you can add the letter anywhere in the sequence.
This variant adds a great deal of strategy, knowing that your opponent can’t use certain letters and that you have dibs on your own letters. With multiple players, we tend to divide the alphabet even more, though it’s hard to know what’s a fair distribution.
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I suppose you could always try to play ghost backwards and try to spell a word by starting with the last letter.
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My brother and i would play a variation on word association. Say a word, any word, and the next player has to come up with a rhyming word. Reusing a word is minus points, waiting longer than 10 seconds (depending on a player’s skill) is minus points, longer words are worth more points. We didn’t use a points system, though, we just kinda used admiration
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Super-Ghosts is the best of the Ghosts variations. It allows you to prefix letters to the building word, which eliminates the “dead” certainty of ordinary Ghosts.
This variation was apparently devised (and played) by members of the Algonquin Round Table in the ’20s or ’30s, and I learned about it form a story by American humorist James Thurber.
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Odd, we always used to call the game ‘Fuchsia’. ‘Fuc’ being a well known prefix that would always cause the next player to think they’d lost the game. 🙂
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My buddies and I still play 20 questions, but we pick extremely obscure things or people and don’t limit the number of questions. Games sometimes last for hours. This was more popular while waiting in lines or on a road trip. Lots of fun and no materials necessary
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Another word/song game:
Someone sings a short line from any song (that all players know). The next person has to sing a line from a different song that begins with the last word of the previously sung line. It gets fun when you purposely cut off the line you’re singing at a strange word.
Example:
1: “Hit me baby, one more time”
2: “time is on my side”
1: “…side of life. always look on the bright…”
2: “brightside. i’m coming out of my cage and i’ve been doing just fine”
etc…
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So you could start with a long O, then player two could follow with an N, and the resulting word could be honorous, or only, but not honesty or ontology because they use the wrong O sound.by the way, i report a red news about a controvercial site, SugarmommaMatch.com it enable rich women to have more chance of finding handsome and charming soul mates.
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player two could follow with an N, and the resulting word could be honorous, or only, but not honesty or ontology because they use the wrong O sound.by the way, i report a red news about a controvercial site, SugarmommaMatch.com it enable rich women to have more chance of finding handsome and charming soul mates.
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“Can anyone suggest any other replacement games playable by voice and memory only?”
This question was asked on Metafilter, and a number of people suggested enjoyable games:
http://ask.metafilter.com/64057/Games-for-two-players-no-pieces-no-board
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1) There’s a variant of Jotto, that I ‘discovered’ in a logic puzzle book:
One player chooses a valid three-letter word. The other guesses valid three-letter words. The chooser then tells the guesser whether his word agreed on an Odd or Even number of letters (0,2 => even), (1,3 => odd). Rules on doubles/anagrams to be agreed beforehand.
I say: anagrams don’t count as a correct guess; each letter in the guess word counts once against only one letter in the secret word. Eg. EGG is the secret word: RAG is odd, GAG is even; ART is the secret word: WHY is even, RAT is odd, TAT is even.
2) 15
Each player takes turns choosing a number from one to nine. Each number can only be chosen once. A player wins if, at any point, the sum of some three of his numbers is 15. Ties occur.
Eg. if player one has already chosen {1, 4, 9}, he can win on his next turn if can choose 2 or 5.
I like this game because it is easily shown to be isomorphic (exactly equivalent) to a more famous game.
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There is a german version of shiritori where you do not use the last letter, but the second part of a double word.
Examples: Wasserschlange (water snake) – Schlangenbeschwörer (snake charmer). this obviously works better in german, since doublewords, or words combining multiple, usually proper nouns are quite abundant.
I’ve never encountered shiritori as-is in german, However. then again, word games are much less known, here, from what I can tell.
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Two more:
CHAIN GAME
You randomly choose two four letter words (ex: walk and fill). One person starts with the first word, then the next player has to give a clue for a word that is like the first word, but with one letter different. The goal is to get to the other word you chose. The tricky part is that you can’t plan a path together, so even if you know how to get from walk to fill, your partner might lead you astray:
A: Walk
B: There are four of them in a room
A: Wall. You use it in sports games
B: Ball. It tells you how much money you owe
A: Bill. When a cup is empty you __ it up
B: FILL!
To make this harder, choose two words with the vowels and consonants in different positions.
HYPOTHETICAL 20 QUESTIONS:
Like the previously suggested essences, but expanded. One person chooses a person, place, or thing, and everyone else can only ask “what if” questions.
For example, if you chose pencil:
What if I balanced it on my head? It would stay for a few seconds, and it wouldn’t be too heavy
What if I used it as a fashion accessory: You would stick it in your bun (hair)
What if I had to do a talent show act with it? You could juggle them, or….
It’s up to you to decide how much to reveal with each answer
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Ok, i seriously need to know where you bought the balls and how much they cost cause i’m literally there…
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I know the grand father of a friend of mine or something like that…
What he did was play chess with a friend – completely memory based!
That would be sort of cool but I imagine I’d fail at it…
But these comments are a great source of good games to try! Thank you all!
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The “breakfast combo” game (I don’t call it that, but I found a site that does and gives a nice example of how to play).
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~calhikes/wiki/Road_trip_games
It’s a “try to figure out the object I’m thinking of” game, but you can choose things more abstract than objects, and it can often be more difficult for the person who chose the object rather than just the person/people trying to guess it. Can be played in groups with each person taking their turn when guessing.
Very fun.
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Hock doesn’t work. The other person can say HOCU and force you to spell hocus, which is a curse.
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If you want a good party game, Psychologist is always fun. one person (the doctor) leaves the room. while the doctor is out, the other players form a circle and decide what they’re problem will be. the intire group has the same problem. usually the problem is that you are some celebrity or someone like that. after the problem is agreed apon, the doctor is asked in and stands in the center of the group. From there the doctor can only ask basic questions of a patient(other than “who are you?”) to guess what the group problem is. this goes on until the doctor guesses correctly or gives up. another good variation is setting a pattern within the group. this one involves people usually knowing everyone else pretty well. a sample pattern would be each patient believes that they are the person sitting three chairs to his or her right. this next part makes this variant hard. if the patient answers a question falsely, the person they are supposed to be can say “I disagree.” and switch seats with them. now their answeres are change because the person sitting three chairs to the right is not the same as before.
If you want a quick game to pass time by with only words, there was the one game made popular by “Whose line” where the players improv a conversation in a specific setting and they start each new sentence with the next letter of the alphabet. original game was timed from the until players cycle completely through alphabet (i.e. A-A or X-X). if bored and want to just entertain yourself or it’s you and your brother, use the template but continue to cycle through the alphabet with no time limit. see how long it goes until you get bored or annoyed.
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My standard reply to “y” as player 2 has always been “t…” much faster for player 1 to realize they’ve lost 😀
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you bastard! i lost $20 in a bet over your ‘solution’ – hazel! arghhhhhhh!
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Perhaps you are unaware that haze is a word.
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Has no-one mentioned “I went shopping” yet?
I did a quick search for the string and IE didn’t find it, so I’ll assume no.
It can be played with any amount of players. It’s just a memory game. Player one starts with “I went shopping and I bought…” and chooses an item. Any item. It doesn’t even have to be a real product, or anything tangible if you like.
The next player repeats: “I went shopping and I bought…” and must repeat in sequence each item that has been added to the list, before adding a new one.
It gets tricky with more players as there’s more time before you’re actively stating the list, but it teaches you good memory skills at the same time as being a bit of a laugh when you start adding obscure things.
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I want to start playing this game with my friends :]
It may just be because it’s four o’clock in the freakin’ morning, but can someone explain to me why ‘zeppelin’ wouldn’t force a win? I’m incredibly new to this, mind you.
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It seems this other variation of the movie game has not been mentioned. You pick a letter from the alphabet and then go around the group naming movies that start with that letter. Articles (The, A, etc) do not count (ie The Fifth Element files under ‘F’) and you must name a movie within a 30 seconds (this time limit tends to extend as the game passes its first 30 minutes) or else you are out for the rest of the game. you may not name the same movie twice.
If you name a movie that sounds strange, eg Eagle Claw, another player may challenge your movie and you must name some collaborator of the movie or else you are out (or some majority vote takes place to determine your fate). If you are right, the game continues. You may also name genre (Kung Fu) of the challenged movie or its release year (1980). You may not consult the internets during gameplay unless someone who is out/not playing wishes to verify a player’s claim. If no such person is around, you’re SOL.
Pretty simple, and games can last for hours while whatever boring event you are attending passes. Expect epic arguments to break out as well as to whether titles like “The Lip Suckers” actually exist :).
That’s pretty much it. Questions/comments/praises?
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I recommend trying it with only verbs.
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So I’m not quite sure if you are allowed to use suffixes or prefixes, but I have found some words for the spots you haven’t responses for player 2:
h::hello
j::jabbering
z::zebra
I also do not know if you are allowed to say the word has ended at jabber, so if you can add the suffix -ing, you will win.
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Play superghost, where the letter is added to the beginning or end. Handicaps can be given to superhuman players, such as no-dictionary, no-notes, or timed-response.
For dyslexic people like my brother, this version is killer.
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Zebra doesn’t work: zedonk and zeta.
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