In some early episodes of MAS*H, Hawkeye and Trapper would be seen playing a game in which they appear to combine chess, checks, and poker.
Anybody make up games like this?
You forget that it was also a drinking game…
We had a kind of Monopoly/Sorry hybrid, where if two people landed on the same space they rolled the dice and the loser went to jail. We also tried a “drink every time you went to jail” game, but my brother got sent there seven times before getting around the board once and we stopped for his sake.
In my house, we used to go for Scrabble/Boxing.
Then we went for counselling.
Trivial pursuit, UNO with tarot cards and truth or dare. That was the best new years eve party ever.
My friends play a game called 42-card Ka-KAW! which involves playing cards, polyhedral dice, squirt guns, festive headgear, knowledge of the Mayan calender, and copious amounts of alcohol. Explaining the rules, unfortunetly, is entirely contrary to the spirit of the game.
“I once played poker with Tarot cards, and seven people died.”
You sunk my scrabbleship!
<grumble grumble>…:: cleans cereal spew off of monitor ::
We had the opposite situation at our house. We were too lazy to play even one game, so we just set up the Mousetrap board and set it off over and over.
When I was 10 I made up this game that was something like a role playing game that used playing cards and dice. You drew cards to determine what kind of character you had, but each card had multiple meanings, so you had some ability to customize (i.e. a 3 of Spades could mean ‘very short dwarf’, ‘armed with short sword’, or ‘melee bonus of 3’). Then you chose what direction your character was going, and laid down a card in that direction from your character deck, and what was on that card determined what was in that area. Face cards were always something special, some you had to roll to see if you had to draw another card, sometimes you ended up making whole new characters.
I used to have a whole tablet full of tables telling what the cards did, and I used to play it with my nephews and my niece for hours. Sometimes it would take 3 decks of cards.
Mini-golf/bowling.
Rules:
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You “bowl” your first putt.
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Taking turns is not allowed, everyone goes all at the same time.
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If your ball goes off the green, you must stand where it landed and basket-ball lob it at the hole.
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If someone’s ball gets in your way, you can hit it. (Preferrably off the green – see rule #3).
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If you bean the statue of the owl/gnome/dragon, you get bonus points
Granted figuring out the scoring is a bitch, the game takes a lot longer this way, and the people behind you look kinda mad for some reason.
7-Card Prabbleship Pursuit:
Play Trivial Pursuit. Every time you get a question right, you get a Scrabble tile. If you get a pie piece, you get two tiles. Play Scrabble tiles whenever you like, scoring normally. For every ten points you score, you get to take a shot in Battleship. Every time you hit a ship, you get a face up card for the poker game. Every time you sink a ship, you a face down card. Every time a card is received, a round of betting commences. Poker hands are revealed when someone reaches seven cards total, high hand wins the pot. If you have to ask for clarification on the rules, drink.
If you actually manage to play a game of this, please let me know. 
In metagames like Mao, Nomic, RPGs, etc. it would not be uncommon to play another game as a subgame. Say, every time you [something] you make a move on a chess board, and every time you capture a piece you get a [something] in the main game.
Any game can be made into a drinking game
Most games could be combined by tweaking the rules, though it could break them.
Some games are particularly amenable to ‘direct products’ or ‘meta-ing’. It’s like tennis but more so. You win a game when you’re two points ahead. You win a set when you’re 2 games ahead. (OK, maybe not, but you get the idea.) Then to win a set, you’d have to win a whole bunch of matches by at least two. I think it was Doug Hofstadter who talked about a game I can’t remember the name of where three players thought of a number. The one who thought of the middle number one. You won a ‘set’ by winning the MIDDLE number of games. And then there were matches…
Does Chess/Chess count? We once tried ‘tag-team’ the ‘two games in parallel played by partners playing different colours, when you take a piece it’s moved to the other board’ thing, but it didn’t really work for us.
I once combined Lawn Darts and Football (US style)
The EMS responce time in my town is damn quick!
no-one’s mentioned Base-ketball yet?
No-one’s mentioned Calvinball yet??
They’ve played such combined games on Weebl and Bob and also on Spongebob.
I vaguely remember reading about a game in Games Magazine, where a bunch of people get together and write things like “You eat a banana. Gain 300 points, and draw another card, if you currently hold 10 or more item cards.” even though they have no idea what other people are writing. I think it was more like a big heaping pile of randomness than an actual game, come to think of it.
I once pictured a game played on a soccer field, with soccerballs of various colors. You could only kick the white one directly, but the object would be to try to get it to hit the others into certain areas. I don’t think it would be turn-based. Soccool? Maybe you’d pronounce it “so cool”?
Yes, it was Hofstadter.
“Undercut, Flaunt, Pounce, and Mediocrity: Psychological Games with Numbers” Scientific American, August 1982.
All his columns are now in a book called Metamagical Themas. Mediocrity is described on page 709.
Three players each choose a number, without telling the others what it is, until all of them have been chosen. Whoever’s is the “middlest” adds that number to his/her score. That’s level 1. After 5 rounds of this, whoever has the middlest score wins. That’s level 2. And so on. It gets very complicated, of course.
Dungeons and Trivias.
Melee’s consist of a trivia-off with the DM. The HitPoint ratio between the opponent and your character is reflected with the number of questions that you or the DM have to answer. First to get a question wrong sustains damage. Science & Nature is 5 hitpoints all the way up to 50 for Sports & Leisure.
antechinus: Ever play Quiz & Dragons? It’s a fairly old arcade game put out by Capcom, and it works a lot like the game you described. It plays a lot more like a board game than a round of D&D, but the spirit is there.