Ghost
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?
December 31st, 2007 at 12:51 pm
The Matchstick Game. You start off with 15 matchsticks. (I think 15) then player alternate between taking 1~3 sticks. The goal is not to take the last stick.
It’s really just a math game, all you need to remember is the current number.
I remember Mr. Wizard solving it pretty easily, so don’t play this with your little brother. :)
December 31st, 2007 at 12:57 pm
I find Xghost (according to Wikipedia — ever since we started playing this variation we simply refer to it as “Ghost” as the simpler variations prove to be unacceptable) to be a good replacement game, as the winning strategy, while it exists, is probably too hard for the average person to commit to memory. However, the main problems with this variation are 1) most people will need pencil and paper to work out words, and 2) Disputes will be inevitable, so decide on a dictionary early and have it handy.
If you play with a time limit, the focus of play can even be shifted from choosing letters strategically to force the other player to end the word to choosing the most confusing letter possible so that he can’t even think of a word.
Another simple way to “fix” the game is to require that as soon as a word is used in a day, it becomes a non-word for the remainder of the day — so that you can win once with “LL” - llama, but you will lose the second time with “LL” - llamas. This rule can also be combined with any of the Wikipedia variants.
December 31st, 2007 at 1:06 pm
The only other “Word only” game I can think of requires many more players, and it’s called Mafia. I have no idea how common this game is, but for the uninformed:
For this example, there are 12 players. One player is the narrator/host. Three players are the mafia. One player is the sheriff. One player is the doctor. The non-mafia members, sheriff, and doctor are the “townspeople.”
The game has a night-day cycle. It begins at night. All players close their eyes.
The host asks the mafia to awaken. The mafia open their eyes and identify each other. Only the mafia members and the host know who is in the mafia. The mafia members silently communicate and point to a townsperson. That player is executed by the mafia and eliminated from the game. The mafia goes back to sleep.
The host asks the sheriff to awaken. The sheriff opens his eyes and silently points to another player. The host then tells the sheriff if that player is in the mafia or not. The sheriff goes back to sleep.
The host asks the doctor to awaken. The doctor opens his eyes and silently points to another player. If the player pointed to is the one who was executed by the mafia earlier in the night, then the player is miraculously saved by the doctor. The doctor goes back to sleep.
Morning comes, and the host explains what happened during the night - who died, or almost died. The remaining players then discuss who they believe is in the mafia based on who has been killed. At the end of the day, a vote is taken to put a player to death for murdering the night before (regardless if anyone actually died or not). The player with the most votes is killed and leaves the game.
Night begins again.
The game continues until there are more mafia members then townspeople (mafia wins) or the mafia is eliminated (townspeople win).
The identities of the sheriff, doctor, and mafia are unknown. The sheriff may wish to disclose his identity, but has only his word to prove who he is. The doctor will make himself a target if his identity is disclosed.
This is a great party game. It’s also played on forums from time to time. I’ve played a few games on a forum, and it’s fun there as well, because these is private messaging to help players communicate behind the scenes.
December 31st, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Pertinent question: what dictionary was used?
December 31st, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Linked to this from the Ghost entry on wikipedia.
December 31st, 2007 at 1:21 pm
aortic?
December 31st, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Good job, this is really interesting. Can you post a link to your source code? I’d like to learn Python, so this would be an interesting way to get started. By the way, I recently blasted through a similar project to calculate the probability of winning a battle in the board game Risk. I used Matlab instead of Python. You can see the results at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~kevin/risk/risk.html
December 31st, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Back when I went to math competitions with my HS friends, we played a game that (oddly) never gained popularity beyond that circle. The way it works is:
Every player is always lying or always telling the truth. Nobody knows who is doing which at the beginning of the game. Players take turns, and on a player’s turn, the player has to either say a new (not previously used in that round) logical statement regarding which players are telling the truth and which ones are lying, or declare that the statements made thus far constitute a contradiction. If the players does the latter, the game ends, and the player who called the contradiction wins or loses a point depending on whether they were correct or not.
For example, with three players:
1: A: I always tell the truth
2: B: A always tells the truth or C always lies
3: C: Exactly one of us always lies
4: A: Either B always tells the truth or C always lies
5: B: Contradiction! If A, then 2 => B and 4 => C, which is in contradiction with 3. If not A and B, then 2 => not C, which… oh wait, that works fine. I lose.
If this gets too easy with two players (there are, after all, only four possible states with two players), then you can allow the players to be flip-floppers (meaning that they alternate between saying truth and saying falsehoods), which gives you 16 states (flip-floppers can be of one of two different parities).
December 31st, 2007 at 1:25 pm
So all you have to do is remember the whole ubuntu wordlist :)
I guess you should learn a foreign language. Something like japanese where there are no individual letters but syllables would probably be too easy otoh.
December 31st, 2007 at 1:30 pm
If you want to make it really fun, take the “can’t re-use words” idea and extend it indefinitely. Between two players, once a word is used, it can never be used again for as long as either player can remember it was used.
Regardless, the game is more fun with more than two players, if you can find that many. It gets nearly impossible to force a win with >3 players; you’re just trying to force someone else to lose.
December 31st, 2007 at 1:31 pm
oh, and cruciate maybe?
December 31st, 2007 at 1:33 pm
That’s so freak! hahaha
But I can’t figure out a better way of playing it.
Have a nice 2008 :)
December 31st, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Password is a great game for 4 players. One person from each team agree upon a secret word, and then take turns giving one-word clues to their teammates until the secret word is guessed. The guessers naturally have the benefit of hearing the one-word clues from both sides, so you need to make clues obvious, and yet un-obvious enough so that the other team won’t be able to take advantage of it if your teammate misses it.
December 31st, 2007 at 1:47 pm
G-A-M-E — Player 1 loses by spelling “Game”
Nope, Player 2 loses for spelling “gam.”
December 31st, 2007 at 2:01 pm
>The only other “Word only” game I can think of requires many more players, and it’s called Mafia.
Mafia is a great game, but it requires cards (or some other physical means) of informing every player what they are secretly.
December 31st, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Word Disassociation:
You must say a word. Any word will do. But your word must have no relation at all to the previous word said. If anyone thinks there is a connection (and the rest of your group agrees it’s real and not imaginary), then you lose. The precise opposite of word association.
I believe that this game is a favourite of many Discordians, though I’ve never caught them red-handed.
December 31st, 2007 at 2:20 pm
The z words : for zenith, doesn’t player 1 lose assuming “zen” is a word?
December 31st, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Somewhere in the afterlife, Jame Thurber’s spirit rests more easily today.
December 31st, 2007 at 2:28 pm
I don’t know a name for it, but I’ve played a word game a few times wherein one player says a word, and the next player’s word has to begin with the last letter of the previous word. Words can’t be repeated, and there has to be a remaining word that begins with the letter ending each word played. You can challenge a word, and the player who named it has to state a word that begins with its last letter.
It’s also solvable, obviously, with a dictionary and a lot of time, but it tends to last a little longer than Ghost in my experience.
December 31st, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Looking at the examples, I think the rule is “don’t count words three letters or less”, and not “less than three letters”. That explains away “gam” and “zen”, too.
December 31st, 2007 at 2:39 pm
gam and zen don’t lose considering that more letters can be added on to it to complete the word to a point where it cannot be extended further. Amongst my friends this game is known as challenge. When it got boring we decided to play the same game but in reverse. eg: E-M-A-G to spell GAME. These games work well in chat too..
December 31st, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Mafia is a great game, and you don’t necessarily need cards or another physical means.
Leader: “Okay everyone close your eyes. One tap is mafia, two taps is doctor, three taps is detective, four taps is vigilante” or whatever.
There are so many variations as more and more people join. With about five you can play fairly with two mafia and one doctor (and two nothings, or maybe add the detective/sheriff). When you hit about 8 you can have three mafia (see, the mafia win if their number makes up half the total population, so you need to take that into consideration). Also adding a Vigilante can help. The Vigilante is a solo killer who can choose to kill per turn and his style is notably different from that of the Mafia. Vigilante can be good or evil, it really depends on the person. It can get better and better.
I played an IRC version of this and we got thirty people playing once: the roles were freaky. There was: Townspeople, Mafia, Doctor, Detective, Vigilante, Informant for the Mafia (snitch, who got to know the identity of one person and relay it to the Mafia and the Lawyer (explained later)), Informant for the Detective (bum, who did the same as the snitch but just for the Detective), Bartender (who could poison one person and himself or learn the identity for himself of one person per turn), Hacker (who revealed to everyone what a person’s role is per turn), Lawyer (who worked with the Mafia that could save one person from getting hung by the town per turn), the Prostitute (who prevented one player from having their turn by “keeping them busy”), and the Drug Lord (who gave people crack each turn and subsequently turned them into Crack Addicts. If the Drug Lord died, the Crack Addicts died).
Phew. Some strategy while I’m at it: Classic situation: Newbie Detective finds a Mafia on turn one and yells out (after some civilian has kicked the bucket) I’M THE SHERIFF AND RALPH IS THE MAFIA! Well Ralph may or may not die, but this Detective is screwed … unless the Doctor saves him and given the relative intelligence of the group that might not happen. On the IRC version, the Detective was allowed to invite civilians/good guys that he had checked and cleared (the Detective got to know exactly what position the people he investigated was) into the specified channel that the Gamebot was in. The Mafia had the Mafia, Snitch, and Lawyer in the room. Everyone else were alone.
*Pant, Pant* If this makes any sense let me know.
December 31st, 2007 at 3:03 pm
I’ve considered playing Ghost on an “open-ended” basis, much harder to game. What you build is a string of letters anywhere within the word. You can add letters on either side. All you have to do is prove that you are building that string towards a word.
An exemplar would be G…UG…UGL….UGLO…. now the sequence only yields BUGLOSS and ZEUGLODONT.
Of course there will be a finite number of options and outcomes, driven by the dictionary you choose for arbitration. But it gives Ghost a new life.
December 31st, 2007 at 3:03 pm
What if you’re playing with more than 2 people?
December 31st, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Sometimes to spice it up, we play you can add letters to both ends — not sure if that fixes the problem, but it might help.
Also, differing minimum word lengths.
December 31st, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Ian, yes, it makes sense, although maybe only because I’ve played regular Mafia before. Man, that IRC version is pretty intense, and all of a sudden I REALLY want to play it.
As for Ghost, I’ve only played with 4+ people, but once it gets to about 6, it’s pretty hard to predict how things will go all the way around the circle. I played with 10 once while waiting for a plane, it was confusing.
December 31st, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Besides the fact that zen is three letters, it’s a proper noun. At least that’s why it’s not in either of the tournament scrabble dictionaries.
December 31st, 2007 at 3:30 pm
heterosexuality?
December 31st, 2007 at 3:33 pm
i was about to suggest the game that nick mentioned - me and my sister call it rock dominoes, because it’s like dominoes but with words, and we use categories, usually rock bands (extended to any band/artiste usually). you call a band, for example oasis, and the next person has to call one that begins with the last letter of the previous band, so it would be S. you can’t re-use bands either within the same game, or within the same day. one of the only winning plays i know is to use a band that ends in X, of which there are more than bands starting with X. obviously with different categories (countries, famous people, films) it changes.
December 31st, 2007 at 3:39 pm
In the movie Go, the characters play a game similar to the one Nick names above, but instead of the next word beginning with the last letter of the first one, they use only dead celebrities and the next celebrity’s first name begins with the first letter of the last name used previously. So: Louis Armstrong - Albert Einstein - Ella Fitzgerald, etc. Naturally the criteria can be changed to make it more interesting–I’d be horrible at only naming dead celebrities and it wouldn’t be much fun, while some people would be way too good if they could use ones who were alive.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:15 pm
5-letter word game.
As many players as you want - works fine with two.
Each player thinks of a 5-letter word with no duplicate letters.
In turn, each player guesses a 5-letter word for the next player, and they get told how many letters they have in the word.
Figure out the next player’s word before yours is found out and you win.
It’s a bit trickier if you don’t write anything down.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:34 pm
here’s a variation on RodeoClown’s game, but you need pen and paper so i’m not sure if it qualifies
It’s called Jade, my sister and brother and i play it all the time. It works best with two people, but sometimes we would have a competition to see who could guess the word in the fewest tries.
one person picks a five letter word with no duplicate letters
the second person writes down the alphabet at the top of their paper and a series of 5 letter words with no duplicate letters. The fisrt person will then write down how many letters in each word are correct eg:
if my word was table
chair 1
lamps 1
ect.
i’m not sure if the alphabet was in the original rules but it does help to cross of letters as you eliminate them
December 31st, 2007 at 4:37 pm
When I played Mafia we always required that the narrator make up a story for how the victim died, including a story of how the doctor rescued them if applicable. Also, when people were accused, they could make up stories in their defense about where they were when the narrator’s story occurred. The stories always ended up being hilarious, and with Ian’s variant with so many roles they could get really ridiculous :)
December 31st, 2007 at 4:49 pm
The “last letter of the previous word is the first letter of the next” game that several people have mentioned is also popular in Japan, where it’s called “shiritori”. Of course, you go by syllable/character due to the nature of the Japanese alphabet. Also, picking a word that ends with the “n” character is considered a loss, since no Japanese word begins with that character.
I the manga/anime Genshiken, the characters at one point play “Gundam shiritori”, using only names, places, and concepts from the long-running Gundam giant-robot franchise.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:04 pm
There’s also subtle lyric games that you can play with other people. These mostly involve slipping lyrics into conversation and seeing if the other person can pick up on the clues and then begin to go along. The thing with this game is once you start you’re never gonna give it up. Though I’m sure it’s never gonna let you down.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:13 pm
There’s The Game of Questions from Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The rules are
1) The first player asks a question.
2) The second player responds in the form of a question, no statements.
3) The question must be relevant somehow, not a non sequitur. No repetition, no rhetoric and no hesitation.
4) The game is scored like a tennis match.
The game can be extended to more than one player. My dad and I used to play this on hikes when I was a kid.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:30 pm
My uncle and I always play word games around made up rule sets. Green Glass Doors is a common example where every word in the sentence has to follow to rule: “contains a set of double letters.” The rule is easy to see if you’re told but often is elusive. We take turns making up a rule set in our heads like: “the first letter of each word and the last letter of each word directly follow each other in alphabetical order.” Then we give out a phrase, or series or phrases that follow the rules and the other player has to crak the code (as it were). Marathon Runners (follows the previous rule I mentioned).
There are tons of different “speech rule” type games I’ve played where every member playing has to try and get the rule right and the moderator has to tell them whether or not they’ve properly caught on.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:49 pm
Jotto. Usually played with paper but doable, with practice, as a memory-only game. You and your opponent each choose a secret five-letter word. No repeating letters allowed in the word. Player 1 challenges with a five-letter word, also with no repeating letters. Player 2 responds with the number of letters the challenge word shares with his secret word. Alternate turns, and the first one to guess the other’s word, wins the round.
For the first four guesses, try SPUNK / CRAZY / LOVED / MIGHT.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:54 pm
I’ve always enjoyed playing Geography. The first player names a place which starts with the letter ‘A’. Then each player takes the last letter of the previous place and uses that as the first letter of the next place. For example: Albany => YellowstonE => EriE => EnglanD => DartmoutH => HawaiI => IllinoiS etc. You get the idea. Variations can be including or excluding rivers, lakes, cities, etc.
December 31st, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Another variation on shiritori that my family plays is to use any words at all, but require that each subsequent word be one letter longer than the last. So one game might go, end => dare => enter => return => neither…
December 31st, 2007 at 7:55 pm
‘Psychiatrist’, also known as ‘the most annoying game in the world when played in the right/wrong crowd’… If you’ve ever played Icehouse games, it’s sort of like Zendo without pieces.
Played with a group of any size; two is possible, but more people is more fun. One person is the “psychiatrist”, and everybody else is a “patient”. The psychiatrist leaves the room while everybody else agrees on a “psychosis”. The psychosis is a rule that describe how every patient must answer questions. The psychiatrist then tries to guess the psychosis by asking as many questions as necessary of whichever patients s/he wants.
There aren’t really any “easy” psychoses, but here are some examples:
- Answers must consist of exactly four words. (Harder: an even number of words)
- Answer all questions as if you were the person to your left.
- All questions must be answered with another question.
December 31st, 2007 at 8:36 pm
>G-A-M-E ? Player 1 loses by spelling ?Game?
>
>Nope, Player 2 loses for spelling ?gam.?
Yeah, and player two would lose on A-B-S-O-R-B by spelling “abs”.
December 31st, 2007 at 9:08 pm
I can’t believe no on mentioned anything like this…
It’s a game I call the Bus Game, although that is pretty arbitrary. The game can play out with tons of people, but you need a long attention span for that. It can be played with a deck of cards, or merely at the mercy of the host.
Ok, now for the actual game:
Basically, it’s a verbal MMRPG (no O, it’s not online). Bear with me, there are no _completely_ fantasy elements (Magic, Space Travel, etc.).
One person is the host; like in mafia, they are God. This person should be fair and experienced.
Every other player starts out in the same situation, but in different places so that they cannot interact in the first couple of turns (if they try, the host should cause them to fail). In the variant called the Bus Game, they all start out on crashed tour busses in an unfamiliar area.
The object of the game is to not be taken to any institution of any kind, public or private, such as schools, hospitals, prisons, NSA holding areas, etc., and to gain as much money and power in the process.
At the beginning of each turn, the host tells the current player their situation (the host needs a good memory) and asks them what they are going to do (simple actions like get off the bus before the police come). The host allows them to complete on action, and start a second before moving on to the next player.
-VARIATION: If playing with a deck of cards, the card need to have been divided evenly to the players, and then at the beginning of each round, players draw a card form the top of their pile and play it on the table. The players are “ranked” in the order of their cards to determine their “favor” with the gods on that turn. If a player plays the highest card, they have good luck (and success in their endeavours); the lowest card, bad luck.
The actions of the players and the outcomes need to be realistic:
If a player says “I see player X through the window and throw a knife at him (to kill, thus eliminating another competitor), this action would fail if that player hasn’t picked up a knife anywhere or read Knife Throwing for Dummies. (Yes, I have had players hijack cars to get to the library, and then read books for a few turns. I have also had a player rob a Toys-R-Us with a staple gun and then get beaten up by a small child because they had no self defence skills.)
It all relies on the creativity of the players and especially the host. It can be especially tiring for the host, though, when players get themselves into tricky situations that the host has to make interesting.
Perhaps it defeats the purpose of this discussion because there no way to “beat” the game, other than learning the personal style of the host. I find, however, that I never play any “normal” word games when in the company of people who know this one instead, so it can’t be that boring…
December 31st, 2007 at 9:30 pm
I’ve always been a fan of blindfolded connect-four. On every turn, you have to describe the whole board, though. We usually only used a 5×5 board to keep things rememberable.
December 31st, 2007 at 9:48 pm
rozencrantz:
I always preferred 3d tic-tac-toe. You have to name where you’re going like 313 or 211.
If you’re allowed pen and paper, things get a lot more interesting. You can play the game with the grid of dots (where you draw a line every turn), even battleship.
Actually, battleship can get really interesting if you take away the white pegs, don’t announce when you sink a ship, or let players fire as many shots in a turn as they have ships.
December 31st, 2007 at 11:03 pm
I would like to propose a different, and untried, “fix” for Ghost.
If you want to prevent people from calculating the solution to you Ghost dictionary in advance, allow the players to nominate sets of words to be subtracted from the dictionary at the start of the game.
For example:
player 1 nominates “words beginning with vowels”
player 2 nominates “words containing adjacent identical letters”
Player 2 is not allowed to nominate a set that contains all of the words in player 1’s nomination. For example, player 2 could not use “words that do not begin with h, j, m or z”. This rule is intended to prevent player 2 from having advanced knowledge of the dictionary.
Players should be able to argue that their nominated set contains less than 20% or the words in the dictionary. This rule is to prevent the dictionary becoming too small.
After the words have been chosen, the nominated words are treated as if they are not in the dictionary. That is, spelling them will not lose the point and they can not be given to show a string is the start of a word.
December 31st, 2007 at 11:49 pm
If anyone’s interested in playing Mafia online, there’s a large community at http://www.mafiascum.net, that has all sorts of games ranging from newbie for people that have just started and themed games where every role is based on a certain theme (be it a movie, book or something else). It’s really fun, typically a game will stretch on for a few weeks though so if you’re impaitent don’t bother. There’s also games on the SomethingAwful forums.
January 1st, 2008 at 12:19 am
RodeoClown and DavidF almost took my entry, which is a four-letter version of Jotto, and the only one I’d ever known by that name.
Two players each choose a secret 4-letter word. Duplicate letters are allowed. Proper nouns and anagrams are not (except for cases where there is an actual word spelled the same, such as “ford” or “aids”). Extending a 3-letter word with “-s” is legal (though it is also a quick way to get your word guessed).
Players then alternate guessing the other’s word. The ‘defender’ must report the total number of letters of the ‘attacker’s’ word which are BOTH correct AND in the correct location. Game ends when someone is forced to respond, “Four.”
Example: PlayerA chooses “life” and PlayerB chooses “boat”
A: “foot.”
B: “2. wisp.”
A: “1. feet.”
B: “1. wise.”
A: “2. moot.”
B: “2…” etc.
Easy to play, easy to teach, and most people have enough 4-letter words in them to last a while. The only trouble I usually run into is cache pollution, where I remember too many of the previous rounds to keep track of the current one.
–Patrick
January 1st, 2008 at 1:15 am
I agree with your brother.
January 1st, 2008 at 1:49 am
Is it just me, or does player 1 only lose on G-A-M-E if there are three players?
When I first learnt Ghost, player 1 began the word with two letters, and each player added one letter thereafter. Would that make much difference to the solution?
January 1st, 2008 at 2:23 am
So David’s figured out the Ubuntu dictionary lacks “aortic” and “cruciate”. Even before reading the comments, I noticed “ilmenite”. They all favour player 1.
With the aid of a dictionary I found some that favour player 2:
If you allow slang, “het”.
If you don’t, “hetaera” or “hetaira”. (An ancient Greek equivalent of a geisha.)
Or “heterosis”. (Hybrid vigour.)
Or “heterosporous”/”heterospory”.
Or “heterostylous”/”heterostyly”.
That takes care of H, at least until you rebuild your tree. For J: “jus”. For M:
If you allow poetic/literary words: “mavis”. (A song thrush.)
If you allow rare spellings: “mizen”.
Or “mozetta” (plural “mozette”), an alternative spelling of “mozzetta”, a high-ranking Catholic cleric’s cape.
Finally, Z:
Regrettably, “zombify”/”zombifies”/”zombified” are listed as informal.
But you can still use “zucchetto”. (A Catholic cleric’s skullcap.)
Of all of those, the only ones my spell-checker knows are “aortic” and “mizen”.
It’s amazing how useful the Roman Catholic Church is in this game…
January 1st, 2008 at 3:16 am
Well if you are playing multiple rounds you could have a round start with the last two letters from the previous round.
January 1st, 2008 at 3:49 am
Hmm..very interesting. You keep talking about 1 and 2 players only. We keep playing GHOST with more than two players sometimes. I would want the mathematicians to compute the various outcomes then.
Reverse Ghost is also great fun like BadarZ said. and it is much more taxing on your verbal and analytical parts of the brain.
When more people are playing, we use the DONKEY thing.. where for every loss the player becomes D, then DO and so on.
January 1st, 2008 at 4:08 am
Siraj, interesting. Instead of DONKEY, I’ve always played with GHOST. Personally, I prefer Superghost, because Ghost is just too easy.
Sam, thanks for the link. Check out Mafiascum’s newest member. :)
January 1st, 2008 at 8:59 am
Mornington Crescent. ’nuff said.
January 1st, 2008 at 10:30 am
I know of only one game that can be played very easily, and that is The Game. If you haven’t been introduced to The Game yet have a look at http://ilostthegame.org/ , you’d be surprised how many people around you are playing it when you accidentally loose.
So yeah, this post made me loose the game :P
January 1st, 2008 at 10:32 am
I haven’t read all the posts, so perhaps someone else named this. You need at least 4 people, I suppose, and the game goes like this. One of you thinks of a “pattern” for words… it can be really silly such as “it begins with a”, “it has four letters” or stranger things like “it begins with a letter which is also the initial of one of our names” or “exactly on letter appears twice in the word, and the rest once”. You start by giving a word that fits the rule, and one that doesn’t. Then you go in turns proposing a word or trying to come up with the rule. The one who picked the rule has to confirm or deny that the words said adapt to the rule. ventualy, if it comes back to him, he gives another example.
It can be really fun, the last time we played it we used both “hard” examples above, and it took wuite a while to solve.
January 1st, 2008 at 11:29 am
Haven’t played this since I was in my drinking-game days, so it might be too simple…
Think of a couple of words (or things around you) that are connected in some way, then think of some that aren’t. Then put them in this “frame”: i.e., Billy loves Halloween, but doesn’t like Christmas. Billy loves cheese, but doesn’t like gouda. Billy loves battles, but doesn’t like war. The other person would have to guess Billy likes double letters. It can, of course, be much more complicated than that. But not before I’ve had my coffee.
It’s better if the two words are very closely related (like battles and war, glass and windows) - until the person catches on, they’re trying to figure out how those two things are different.
Also - did you know how many popular cheeses have double letters? I didn’t, ’til I tried to think of one that did not: cheddar, mozzarella, swiss…
We had one game where the difference ended up being that the the things he loved were reflective, the things he didn’t like were not - like spoon and napkin, glass and curtain. So it doesn’t just have to be actual letter patterns.
January 1st, 2008 at 12:42 pm
one more version of shiritori (last letter is start of next) different categories, like number of letters, we always start with 2 letter words and increase as people lose. 4 and 5 are the most fun
a game i don’t like is where you say a movie and the next person names an actor/actress in that movie and the next person has to name a different movie with that actor, next names a different actor…an odd number of people is suggested.
i know a few pencil and paper games, like sprouts, but i can’t think of anything else that hasn’t been mentioned
January 1st, 2008 at 12:59 pm
> So David?s figured out the Ubuntu dictionary lacks ?aortic? and ?cruciate?.
I knew this would eventually turn into a competition to see who had the biggest dict.
January 1st, 2008 at 1:13 pm
A good game that doesn’t require anything but memory is this version of even-odd that I learned in math class:
Two players, one is even and one is odd.
Each shows either a 1 or a 2 on their hands at the same time.
If the sum is odd, the odd player gets the sum added to their score.
If the sum is even, the even player gets the sum added to their score.
(1&1: +2 for even, 1&2: +3 for odd, 2&2: +4 for even)
Keep going for however long and the person with the highest score wins.
It has an interesting solution, actually, but you need some sort of random number generator to play “perfectly,” so it would be good to play with your brother.
January 1st, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Thanks Kree, you made me (and some friends ;)) loose
January 1st, 2008 at 3:35 pm
My friend and I play a game called the numbers game. It can be played with two or more players. Each round one player picks a random number in their head, any number at all that they feel is acceptable. The other player (or players) then guess what the number is. If they get it wrong (quite likely) then they are told it is wrong. If they get it right they are told it is right. The round then ends and the player does not reveal what the number was. The round continues with the next player thinking of a new number and so on.
The game is very meaningless and goalless. All that happens is that if you play quite a lot, your thoughts and the way you pick random numbers start to magically synchronize. It is very interesting to play.
There is another game I play with another friend called the card game. It’s basically the same except one player uses a pack of cards to generate random cards which the other player has to guess. I also developed that in to a wonderful card trick that is utterly amazing only 1 in 52 times.
January 1st, 2008 at 4:10 pm
About replacement games, I know only guessing animals (or other well-defined objects). One player chooses an animal, while the other has to guess which one was it, by asking such questions about the animal that have a yes/no answer. And you define how many direct tries (”Is it a lion?”) at a species a player can have - one, or maybe three… if there are two people playing.
If there are more, then they take turns asking questions. If answer is yes, they can ask another question, if it is no, next person asks. The one who guessed gets a point and is the next one to choose an animal.
January 1st, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Over here in Germany the popular version of Mafia is “Werewolves”. The idea is basically the same, except that you have werewolves (same as mafia), citizens (also the same), and (which of these is a matter of agreement):
- the witch who has two magic drinks; one kills, one saves life. After every killing by the werewolves she is told the victim and can decide whether to save him/her (this includes herself). She can also decide when to use the poisonous drink and on whom. Once both are used she becomes a mere citizen.
- the little girl is allowed to peek, but obviously shouldn’t get caught by the wolves
- the mayor is elected in the first round and has two votes on who is to kill by the citizens. Often candidates are allowed to say why they would like to be elected.
- amor selects two people during the first night which become the secret couple. Only they (and amor and the host, of course) know who they are. Once one of them dies (whether werewolve or not) the other dies as well of broken heart.
Of course there can be even more roles.
Usually there are long discussions during daytime who os to kill. Mostly behaviour in these is an important factor in decisions.
January 1st, 2008 at 5:08 pm
There are more words that start with ll: http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/search?p=ll*&searchmode=normal
Well, actually just Llullaillaco and llano, and I suppose they wouldn’t let you win, but the first time you did it you would make your brother say “challenge” :P
January 1st, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Wouldn’t Zebra be a win for the 2nd player?
January 1st, 2008 at 7:17 pm
My dad and I created a game while waiting in line at Six Flags Great America a couple years back, and we’ve kept it going ever since. It’s called Threes, and is very simple. We like it because nobody ever wins or loses.
You ask the other player for at least three responses to a statement. For instance, “Name three novels by Stephen King that haven’t been turned into movies or TV shows.” This would be a difficult feat for anyone who’s never actually read King, but wouldn’t be a challenge for me or my dad. The idea is to get the other player to think, not to stump them. I would never ask my dad, “Name three of Lil Slugger’s victims,” and he would never ask me, “Name three pitchers for the Cincinnati Reds,” because we know the other player doesn’t know that. My favorites questions are the ones when you start having a conversation about the answers and forget to keep playing. It’s great for doing yardwork, riding in a car with a broken stereo, or for getting to know someone.
Now, name three stick figures.
January 1st, 2008 at 10:18 pm
Play Questions - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questions_%28game%29
January 1st, 2008 at 11:30 pm
One of my favorite word games that needs no extra equipment is Contact. It doesn’t fill quite the same niche as Ghost, because Contact requires at least 5 players, but it’s a fun party game when you have a bunch of people around.
Here’s how it works. One person picks a word, and throughout the game, the other players are trying to guess the word. I’ll call the player with the word the leader. The leader tells the other players the first letter. Then, the other players guess at the word, but instead of just stating a guess out loud, they think of a possible word that could fit, and come up with a clue for it. For instance, if the letter is “c”, and a player wants to guess the word “corset”, he might give the clue “does it shape the belly?”
Now the leader needs to figure out that the clue refers to “corset”, and say “no, the word is not corset” (or, if the word is “corset”, say “yes, it is corset” and the person who gave the clue wins). If the leader can’t think of a word that matches the clue with the currently known prefix, then other players who do figure out what the word refers to can shout out “contact”. After one or more people have contact, and the leader can’t think of a word that matches the clue in a reasonable amount of time, she counts down “3, 2, 1″ at which point all the people who had contact say the word (simultaneously) they were thinking of that matches the clue. If at least one person had the same word as the person who proposed the clue, then the leader has to give the next letter of the word, and people keep guessing, but restricted to the total known prefix, until someone finally gets the word. The player who figured out the word wins, and usually becomes the next leader, or at least gets to decide who the next leader is.
Here’s an example of play, to make it a little clearer how it works:
Leader: The letter is “k”
Jim: Is it a class with five-year old kids?
Leader: No, it is not kindergarden.
Julie: Is it being really nice to someone?
Leader: Hmm…
Jim: Contact!
Amber: Contact!
Leader: Oh! No, it is not kindness
Lance: Is he on the road, with his brain squirming like a toad?
Julie: Contact!
Leader: Um…
Amber: Oh, right, contact!
Leader: I should know this…
Leroy: Contact!
Leader: I can’t think of it. Ok, ready? 3, 2, 1…
Lance, Amber, Leroy in unison: Killer!
Leader: Oh, right, from Riders On The Storm. OK, the next letter is n.
Amber: “KN”, huh? Hmm…
* etc *
OK, now with the example out of the way, here are some clarifications for how it works in certain situations.
Say the letter is “c”, and someone asked “is it red?”, thinking of crimson, and got contact. Now, the leader sits and things for a while, and says “No, it is not a cherry”. That is a perfectly acceptable response to the clue, because the clue was not specific enough. As long as the leader can make a response that matches the clue, they can avoid having to give up a letter even if their word isn’t what the questioner was thinking of. And, if the word the leader has is “crimson”, then the leader can say “no it is not a cherry” to avoid having the game end so soon, at least until the question comes up with a more specific clue.
Generally, the word in question is supposed to be a noun. The words referred to by clues are usually allowed to be anything but a proper noun, though it’s usually considered to be acceptable to use a clue that refers to a proper noun which is a homonym for a valid word; for instance, I could use the clue “Is it a Steve who revolutionized the online music business?” and expect “Jobs” as the answer, because “jobs” is not a proper noun.
If a clue or word requires specialized knowledge, then it’s not allowed; you can’t ask a question like “is it the reification of the rest of the program’s computation after evaluating an expression?” and expect “continuation”, unless you’re playing with a group of Lisp hackers.
January 2nd, 2008 at 1:02 am
Noun-Noun-Noun. The greatest geek-proof game ever. My high school math team developed it on a long bus ride back to school during a lengthy debate on the optimal rocks paper scissors strategy. The game only requires 2+ reasonable people (or 3+ unreasonable people) The game is played exactly like rocks paper scissors but the players choices are not limited to rocks paper or scissors, instead they can pick any object they want. The two objects must be reveled simultaneously, or else the slow player auto-losses. The two players then explain why their object would win a fight (ie a rock would rip through paper) The best explanation wins. Objects can only be used once per game and explanations can’t go over 2 minutes and there are no rebuttal to the explanation. There are limits to how many adjectives you can use in your object but these don’t need to be set up untill after a few games have ended along the lines of “red undefeatable spoon vs green fork that can’t lose”.
January 2nd, 2008 at 1:19 am
Sausages is a game for 2 players. Players take turns naming a word. The first player to names ’sausages’ is the winner.
Winning is so trivial as to not be fun. The fun comes from attempting to win just barely before your opponent was going to.
January 2nd, 2008 at 1:48 am
A good mathematical game for two players is Sylver Coinage. Players take turns naming a positive integer that is not the sum of multiples of previously named integers. The player to name 1 loses.
For example, if I named 4 as the opening move, you could not name 4, 8, 12, 16, …; if you then named 5, I could not name 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, …
It hasn’t yet been solved, but there is a very good discussion of it in _Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays_ by Berlekamp, et al. as well as at http://www.monmouth.com/~colonel/sylver/
January 2nd, 2008 at 1:54 am
I lost the game…
Brian, I really like your idea for a game. I may just have to try it sometime…
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:03 am
I’m surprised nobody mentioned this, but “blubber” would be a loss for player 2 since “blub” is a word, unless its not in either of the wordlists you cited.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/blub
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:14 am
A good game for a larger number of players is silent football (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_football). Although it does contain an actual silent phase requiring more than just talking, the fun comes mostly from pointing out other people’s syntactical errors without making any yourself.
Also sausages sounds a lot like the color-country game (takes turns naming a color of a country, the first to name a country loses).
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:01 am
> G-A-M-E — Player 1 loses by spelling “Game”
I don’t understand how that is so. If the turns are 1-2-1-2, doesn’t the second player lose for G-A-M-E? (Presuming that G-A-M is not recognized as a word, that is.)
January 2nd, 2008 at 8:03 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim
Nim can be played verbally by one play stating the size of the starting piles (e.g. 3, 5, 7), and then next player stating the size of the piles after he has removed from one pile (e.g. 3, 5, 6).
Unfortunately the trick to winning is quite simple to figure out (even if you don’t read the Wikipedia page, which tells you), and the proof is relatively simple as well.
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:44 am
I would think that a subtractive game would have a larger number of possibilities, perhaps one with anagrams, and a less easily coded solution in python.
take a word with N letters (n = big)
enterprise (n=10)
the next player must come up either with a pure anagram of the last word, or an anagram of a set of n-m, where m is like 1 or 2.
So, for example, presenter would be a valid second move. Repeat where n = 9. The person to be able to form the last word loses (or wins), according to preference. This could be done by people with good memories without paper or other tools.
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:20 am
I haven’t read absolutely all the posts but I think the games I’ll explain have not been mentioned.
Here in Catalonia we play a game called “L’assassí” (obviusly, these means “The assassin”). It requires a Spanish cards deck but it can easily be replaced by a French deck. Essentially you need a card for the assassin, one for the policeman and one for the prostitute. Then you need one card for each people remaining.
It works like that:
- The policeman has to guess who the assassin is and the assassin has to kill everyone before that (so it would be nice for him/her to guess who the policeman is in advance). If the policeman fails in his guessing he loses.
- The assassin kills by winking at people. If you’re killed you turn over your card and say “I’m dead” (you can wait a while after you’ve been killed, put 10 or 15 seconds).
- The assassin can also make some acomplicees by sticking the tongue out and from that moment on they can kill as well (and policeman’s work increases).
- Finally the prostitute can resurrect by blowing kisses to death people. Her role is the worst (or the best) because the assassin will try to kill her as soon as possible and if the policeman discovers her she cannot play anymore.
- By the way, the policeman cannot be killed, but he has to watch out because if someone tries to kill him maybe is not the assassin but an acomplicee.
Oh, and if you want just a word game, without extra stuff needed we play what is called “La frase maleïda” which can be translated as “The cursed sentence”. One person starts with a word, and the other one says the previous word and one more, but in order to make a sentence. The third person repeats the two previous words and adds a new one and so on.
Example:
1st player: “The”
2nd plauer: “The house”
3rd player: “The house was”
4th player: “The house was very”
etc.
Of course once you run out of players the first one continues and you keep doing that until someone doesn’t remember exactly what s/he had to say.
A variant of this game is selecting a topic like “fruits” and then each player has to say all the fruits which have been said before and add a new one. The first one who doesn’t remember all the fruits in order loses.
And of course, about Ghost, it would be interesting to run the algorithm in other languages different from English.
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:09 pm
I don’t know what you consider trivial, but a fun game is also the listing game: you come up with a category, e.g. animals starting with l and then the players have to name one a time until they cannot think of any more. It requires some reason to give up after you couldn’t think of a new word for some time.
It’s part of the fun when word come to your mind long after the game is over.
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Hey, yeah! Wouldn’t zebra win for the second player??
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
>> G-A-M-E — Player 1 loses by spelling “Game”
>> A-B-S-O-R-B — Player 2 loses by spelling “ABSORB”
>> B-Z-”Challenge” — Player 1, seeing “Z”, says “Challenge.”
> I don’t understand how that is so. If the turns are 1-2-1-2, doesn’t the
> second player lose for G-A-M-E? (Presuming that G-A-M is not
> recognized as a word, that is.)
I don’t get it either. If each player adds a single letter, then for both of these examples (an even number of letter) the same player would lose. Player 2, if player 1 starts.
I thought maybe you alternated the starting players, but your third example has player 1 starting, just like in the second example.
January 2nd, 2008 at 1:00 pm
> Hey, yeah! Wouldn’t zebra win for the second player??
No, because once the second player added “e”, the first player would add “n” and not “b”. And so the second player won’t be able to complete “zen” to “zebra” (Mind you, if you allow a more extensive word list, Wikipedia claims there’s a Japanese word written “zenra”, but that’s beside the point).
The idea isn’t that there are no words starting with “Z” with an odd number of letters, but that it’s possible for the first player to force the final word away from them.
January 2nd, 2008 at 1:30 pm
But Zen is a word.
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Ah, gotcha… Thanks for the clarification Yaron.
# Matt: Zen is a word, but it’s 3 letters, so doesn’t count.. -_-
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Oh, okay. I misread it as “less than 3 letters”.
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:29 pm
So besides Jotto (my Jotto page with some variants is at http://www.aq.org/~kevin/jotto/, and I’ve played Jotto with no paper while driving), a nice no-equipment game is something someone taught me as “1-2-3″, although it may have other names. So, basically, two people count to three, and then after three they each say a word (simultaneously). Without any discussion, this process repeats. The goal is to say the same word. So, for example:
Player 1: “boat”
Player 2: “ham”
So, maybe Player 1 thinks that a gravy boat is something that would be on the table with ham, and maybe Player 2 thinks that a trough is sort of like a boat that uncooked ham (i.e., a pig) eats out of. So, after another three count, they would say:
Player 1: “gravy”
Player 2: “trough”
I believe there was also a stipulation that you can’t reuse words, so you couldn’t go back and say “boat” for the next round. Play continues until the two players eventually get the same word.
When I played this game, it was in a group of people, so one person would just say “1″, and then someone else would say “2″, and then they would say “3″ together, as a way of figuring out who was ready to play. We played this while we were making and assembling origami boxes to use as centerpieces for my sister’s wedding.
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:09 pm
I can’t believe noone has mentioned my personal favorite, “BBout”.
Players begin the game by saying “BB in”. Optionally a pinky lock can be used at the same time.
Once you start playing, anytime you say a word that starts with a ‘b’, everyone else that is playing pummels you until you say ‘bbout’.
Also note that if you say ‘bbout’ without saying a b word, you must say it again for the pummeling to stop.
There’s no way to end the game really….
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Botticelli is the voice and memory game of choice among my friends. It helps a lot if you and the person/people you’re playing with know similar cultural references.
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Way to rip off Gary Larson.
Re: Amazon Basin.
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Here’s another one from math team:
At any given time, each player has some number of fingers up on each hand. You start with one up on each. A turn consists of tapping hand B with hand A, where A and B are different and A is one of your hands. (So you can tap your left hand with your right hand, for example.) Then add to hand B the number of fingers currently on hand A.
If at any time one of your hands has all five fingers up, it goes to zero and is “dead”. If both your hands are dead at the same time, you lose. However, if one of your hands is dead and the other has an even number of fingers on it, even if it isn’t your turn, you can “split” those fingers between your two hands. (So if you have zero on your left hand and four on your right, you can change it to two and two.) A dead hand can’t be hit and can’t hit any other hand.
Sample game:
I’m notating each person’s hands as x-y, where x is left and y is right.
A has 1-1, B has 1-1. A hits himself.
A has 1-2, B has 1-1. B hits A’s right.
A has 1-3, B has 1-1. A hits B’s left with his right.
A has 1-3, B has 4-1. B hits A’s left with his left.
A has 0-3, B has 4-1. A hits B’s right with his right.
A has 0-3, B has 4-4. B hits his left with his right.
A has 0-3, B has 0-4. B splits.
A has 0-3, B has 2-2. A hits B’s left with his right.
A has 0-3, B has 0-2. B chooses not to split, and hits A’s right.
A has 0-0, B has 0-2. B wins.
It probably has a winning strategy, but I’ve never gone through and figured it out. It was interesting enough to keep my friend and I occupied through a long, boring high school graduation rehearsal.
For good measure, here are a few other Mafia variants:
- The Magician (also called the Bus Driver) can switch two people during the night. Whatever was supposed to happen to one (killing, being saved, being slept with by the prostitute, or whatever) happens to the other instead. If the Magician is very smart or lucky, (s)he can get the mafia to kill one of their own using this power.
- When I played in high school, the prostitute was originally a useless role having no bearing on the game. Each morning, the narrator would announce, “Oh, and X got laid. Congratulations.” Later, we added the role of “person with [insert STD here]“, and the prostitute would die if they slept with that person.
- With enough people, add a Serial Killer who acts just like the mafia, but alone. SK wins iff they’re the last person alive. With a very large number, you can have mafia and werewolves, two evil teams. And with a huge number, add a SK to that, too!
- There are also strange roles that win alone under special circumstances. For example, there’s one (I forget what it’s called) that automatically survives the first time the mafia kills them. After that, the narrator somehow informs them that the attempt on their life has been made. They then win the game (and everyone else loses) if they die during the day and lose if killed at night.
You can really do a lot with Mafia when it’s played online.
January 2nd, 2008 at 7:10 pm
The word Hocus invalidates h.
January 2nd, 2008 at 7:19 pm
There’s something that we play…that’s probably little more than a one-upsmanship on whose vocabulary lasts the longest…but we pick a word that ends in ‘ate’ ‘iate’, tious, ‘ceous’ or ‘tion’ and just keep going back and forth until one of us is stumped….we can’t repeat words, oh and if you wait more than about 5 seconds to take your turn..the other player automatically wins which usually involves much crowing and guffawing….I guess if needed a name..”suffixes would be a good title.
I do however really like the idea for Threes set forth by Ogreman Sam….3 stick figures are: Mrs Roberts, Black hat, and Stallman
January 2nd, 2008 at 7:40 pm
I played ghost with my family a great deal on car trips, but we always played double-ended. There is another game that we would play though called “Inky Pinky” (probably not the real name).
It works like this: one person thinks of two words with the same number of syllables that rhyme (ex. “comic tonic”). Then, they think of a clue and tell the other players what it is (ex. “a cure for xkcd”). Then they say how many syllables the word has by modifying the phrase “Inky Pinky” (e.g. for 1 syllable: “Pink Ink”, for 3 syllables: “Inkity Pinkity”, for 4 syllables: “Inkinkity Pinkinkity” etc.). The other players then try to guess what the two words are.
January 2nd, 2008 at 8:34 pm
@Taber
My friend and I have created a game like that, link in my name. It’s called Gesture Warz. We have 300 defined characters and pure logic decides victory. For example:
Mr. T and Chuck Norris would obviously be a tie because they blow up the world. Chuck Norris beats every Spartan from 300 because he kicks a boulder that explodes into 300 pieces, killing all of them. Chuck loses to the character Nothing. We also have everything, some things, quite a few things, and Shakira beats most male characters.
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:32 pm
I’ve played a different version of ghost, similar to the game Mastermind. Player 1 thinks of a five-letter word, then Player 2 guesses five-letter words. For each word guessed, Player 1 tells Player 2 how many of its letters are contained in the secret word.
So, say the secret word is “ghost”. Player 2 guesses “games”, so Player 1 tells him that he has two correct letters (there’s no way to tell if they’re in the right position or not). Player 2 continues guessing five-letter words until he guesses the correct word.
This game takes a lot of memory, but can absolutely be played verbally only. My family and I play it on long car trips. It can also be played with pencil and paper, to keep track of what words have been guessed and what letters you know are wrong.
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:32 pm
I can’t believe nobody’s suggested Host. It’s exactly like Ghost, except that you’re spelling a word, the first letter of which has been omitted. For “absorb”, the sequence would be B-S-O-R-B.
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:58 am
First: I lost the game.
Now the rest of the response: These are two games I used to play quite often with my brother in long car rides.
The first game we called “The Astounding Atrociously Annoying Alliteration Game” of course the biggest irony being that the game title was not a true alliteration. The rules were very simple, make a 3 word alliteration starting at any letter started the game. The next player (typically just my brother and I would play; but sometimes the whole family would get in on the game) will then make a 3 word alliteration starting with the next letter of the alphabet. Usually it helped if you were thinking about what your next play would be before your turn cuz the other players are allowed to heckle you if you take too long (or help you if the are so inclined). Once you reached “Z” then the next players would start with a four word alliteration starting with “A” and it would keep going. We would be rather lax about what counted as alliterations when dealing with the hard letters like “X” (allowing alliterations that did not start with the letter “X” or just fudging it and allowing the string for that letter to not be a true alliteration). I think the farthest we ever got was six words long (and we did have a rule that the full 3, 4, 5… etc from before could not be reused, but single words were OK).
The second game is a spin off of the classic Sesame Street segment “One of These Things is Not Like the Others,” but with a twist. The point was not to go for the obvious similarities (in fact often there were none). We would pick 4 random objects, often something seen a road sign or something, and then have to find a way to include 3 of the items, but also exclude the fourth. Then the other person would come up with a correlation between three items while excluding a different one. The point was to have a different set of circumstances that excluded each item for a different reason (ie.you can’t name a shared color more than once). You alternate who picks the 4 items, and/or each player picks one or two (depending on the number of players, although we always only played with just the two of us) As an example, the items could be: a penguin, a basketball, an orange (fruit), and some sushi. You could say “A Penguin, a Basketball, and sushi should all have black in them, but an orange should not (unless it’s a bad orange, but that doesn’t count)” or “A Basketball, an orange, and sushi can all be circular (or round) but a penguin is not” or “An orange, a penguin and sushi can all be eaten, but a Basketball cannot” or “Penguin, Basketball, and orange are all spelled with the letter “E” but there is no “E” in sushi”. There isn’t really a “winner” in the game, it’s just a fun way to spend a car ride, but I guess if you named four items and even you can’t make one item NOT part of the group while including the others, then you lose.
There is a third game that I remembered while I was writting about these two that I played once at work. “Are you on the boat?” or something like that. Basically someone is going on a trip and is bringing something with them, this defines the rules for the game. So if I “Kelsa Delphi” am bringing “Killer Donkeys” on the boat, the next person would ask me “If I bring _______, can I come on the boat?” If the thing they brought matched the rule then they can come, if it doesn’t they need to try again. This game works best with a large group of people, and if you help some one out by telling the first couple of people what to bring on the boat. In this case the rule was fairly simple “what ever you bring needs to have the same initials that you do” (however that rule does not work in a group of people who’s names you do not know, or could easily find out), but it could have been “a type of deranged animal” or something.
OK… that’s more than enough for now, MEW!
-Kelsa
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:08 am
[...] — xkcd vs “ghost” [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:29 am
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”…?
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:26 am
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.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:49 pm
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.
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:04 pm
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.
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:11 pm
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.
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:17 pm
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.
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Has anybody tried Silent Football? The game is very fun, but extremely complicated. (the rules are on Wikipedia)
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:34 pm
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.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:58 pm
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?
January 4th, 2008 at 12:13 am
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.
January 4th, 2008 at 1:17 am
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.
January 4th, 2008 at 3:34 am
I love that someone Rickrolled this thread and no one seemed to notice.
January 4th, 2008 at 3:41 am
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 :D
January 4th, 2008 at 3:42 am
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 …
January 4th, 2008 at 3:58 am
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!
January 4th, 2008 at 7:02 am
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
January 4th, 2008 at 9:33 am
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.
January 4th, 2008 at 10:09 am
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.
January 4th, 2008 at 11:16 am
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.
January 4th, 2008 at 11:25 am
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.
January 4th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
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.
January 4th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
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.
January 4th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
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.
January 4th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
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?
January 4th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
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.
January 4th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
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 :-)
January 5th, 2008 at 1:48 am
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.
January 5th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
“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)
January 5th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
”
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.
January 5th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
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.”
January 5th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
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.
January 5th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
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.
January 6th, 2008 at 7:28 am
I know you made a note about this, so there’s a link :
http://www.red-dot.sg/Concept/porfolio/06/05FN/R021LM.htm
January 6th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
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”
January 6th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
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.