time killer games i.e. ghost, tic-tac-toe

The Game Room
1

Last Thursday I went off with my teenage daughter to stand in line for the free seats at the St. Louis Municipal Theatre. We arrived two hours before the gate opened and were near the front of the queue. But we hadn’t done this before and didn’t know the territory (the performance was The Music Man).

Most people had brought chairs and blankets and playing cards to make their wait pleasant. All we could do was snack, snooze on the concrete and play “low resource” games.

We did:
Rock, Paper Scissors
Ghost
The Grid Game (where you make a grid of dots and then take turns drawing lines, but trying to keep the other person from making complete squares)

…and that was about it. We could have done Battleship if we’d had two pencils, but something usually goes wrong in Battleship.

With a younger child, “I Spy” is a good.

Hangman is a classic, but we didn’t think of it at the time.

So what time killer games are common in your clan? Preferably ones that need no props beyond pencil/paper (or maybe coins or sticks.)

2

My wife and I are fond of playing three-dimensional chess in our heads.

3

SLN-LEC?
(Sublingual Knight to left ear canal)

4

The Geography Game

Which may not be its proper name. Someone names a country, city, state, etc. The next person names a country etc. which starts with the last letter of the previous one. Take turns, and do not repeat place names. Can last for hours or weekends if done properly.

Example:
Austrailia
Austria
Alabama
Albany (triumphantly!)
Yellowstone National Park
Estonia
(groan) Alaska
Arkansas

5

My boys love playing that game with me to kill time at restaurants, especially, but we call it Dots.

Twenty Questions is a good game when you’ve got nothing better to do. No equipment necessary.

6

I’m not sure I’ve ever known an “official” name for it, and was just trying for something descriptive.

But, yeah, Dots seems like the popular name for it. Yahoo Games rules page.

7

I used to play this with my Mom, when she got tired of it, and the ooportunity arose, she would say Phoenix or Halifax. pissed me off.

of course now, I know some Chinese cities, but I didn’t when I was 12 yrs old.

8

Since I lived in Ohio, I knew of Xenia, and I was also enough of a geography buff to be able to give Xochimilco as a response to the Arizona or Nova Scotia capital.

Botticelli is a good time-killer. When I was a kid, our family played a simplified version we called “The Initials Game”. One of us would just say “R.R.” or whatever, and other players would take turns asking “Is this a man?”, “Is he alive?”, “Is he in politics?”, etc. If you got a “yes”, you could keep guessing: a “no”, and your turn passed to someone else. Once the answer (Ronald Reagan in this hypothetical example) was guessed, the player who solved the challenge got to give the next set of initials.

9

Superghosts - add a letter to beginning or end.

Sprouts - Sprouts (game) - Wikipedia

10

If there’s paper, we play hangman. I recently beat my mother, after 64 rounds (I keep track in my PDA) with the category of “entertainment before and after” and the puzzle “Mrs. Slocumbe’s Pussy Galore from the James Bond film Goldfinger.” She hasn’t forgiven me for that one.

If there’s not paper, we play “I’m going on a picnic” where each player must name everything being brought on the picnic by those before them, and add an item of their own, and all items must be in alphabetical order, and reasonable things to take on a picnic.

Player 1: I’m going on a picnic and I’m taking apples.
Player 2: I’m going on a picnic and I’m taking apples and a beach ball.
Player 3: I’m going on a picnic and I’m taking apples, a beach ball and Cindy (player 3’s dog)
Player 4: I’m going on a picnic and I’m taking apples, a beach ball, Cindy and dog food (for Cindy).

We also play the geography game, sometimes we toughen it up by making it cities only, or countries only, or U.S. only.

We also play “I’m thinking of a word…” which is now a game of being clever. It goes something like “I’m thinking of a word that starts with d and ends with r and you open it for lingerie.” (drawer) or “I’m thinking of a word that starts with a and ends with e and we’re in it.” (atmosphere)

11

There’ve been several Botticelli threads here on the Dope. It’s fun!

12

This game is probably better suited for long drives rather than waiting in line, but my wife and I play a game called License Plate Golf. I got the basic idea from Games Magazine a while back, but added the “Golf” aspect.

Typically, many license plates have 3 letters in them of the form “TSO 123” or “123 TSO”. The object of the game is to make a word out of the letters on a license plate. The letters in the word must be in the order shown on the license plate, but don’t have to be consecutive.

For scoring, count 1 point for each letter in the word. I typically assign “par” for a plate as 6, and play for 10 “holes” (that is, license plates). So, if each plate has a par of 6, a par (or average) game would be 60 points. The lowest number of points you can score on a word is 3 (e.g., the license plate was “CAB 123”).

For the example above (TSO), a first guess might be “transition”, for a total of 10, or 4-over-par. The second player might come up with “transom”, for 7, or 1-over-par.

The game’s difficulty can be adjusted in several ways:

A. For a player with a stronger vocabulary, set par as 5 instead of 6.
B. For a player with a weaker vocabulary, allow homonym sounds instead of exact letter matches (i.e., “J” and soft “G” are equivalent, “K” and hard “C”, etc.).
C. Agree on the use of proper nouns, hyphenated words, or foreign words (i.e., players with weaker vocabularies can use proper names).

So, if proper nouns are allowed, the example above might be answered with “jetson”.

Or, a person could go for a “birdie” (1 under par) and say “fatso”.

You don’t need paper for this game. Just keep score like this: “+4 for 3” means the player is 4-over-par for 3 words.

This game is good for all ages.