Last weekend I was playing Scattergories with my wife, son, and son’s girl friend. The category was “mobile phones”. I didn’t have much, so I proceeded to do M=m key, O=o key, ect. O and E repeated, so I used “one key” and “eight key”. I, of course, thought that was nothing short of brilliant. My opponents disagreed, and thought they were being generous giving me half the points.
I mentioned that our other son, who was turning in early, would probably agree with me. Ms. P said no way and asked him without telling who had pulled this stunt. He agreed that it was brilliant, and said that the person doing it (he thought it was his brother) should get all the points. My opponents reluctantly relented.
First of all, is it well understood among your group of players, that the category “mobile phones” actually means “things relating to mobile phone” or maybe “parts of a mobile phone”? Because if I heard “mobile phones” I would be thinking “types of mobile phone” or “brands of mobile phone” or “models of mobile phone”. And as a long-time player of social games such as scattergories, there are few things more frustrating than an ill-defined category.
That said, if the category was “parts of a mobile phone”, I think I would accept “one-key” and “eight-key” but not “o-key” or “e-key”.
If it was a more nebulous “things relating to a mobile phone”, it would be very close, hard to say without hearing what types of things are generally accepted or not.
(And since we’re discussing scattergories, I feel like this is as good a time as any to bitch about the two most ridiculous scattergories robberies I ever suffered: the category was “things that are round”, and for the letter N, I came up with “nest”, which was voted down. And the category was “super heroes” and for the letter P I came up with “Pink Power Ranger”, and was voted down.)
(The moral of the story is… play Codenames instead.)