Me and the Mrs like to play word games to pass the time. We only really know one though. It’s the “name all the foods/actors/countries/etc begining with a/b/c/etc” whoever can’t come up with one looses, and you go on to the next letter or category. After 8 years, this is starting to get a little old. Eye-spy is also boring when you still have the same stuff at home that you always had. 20 questions still flies, but we are looking to diversify.
In a fit of experimentation last night we tried a number game instead, with each of us trying to work out 417x417 in our heads. It nearly gave me a brain haemmorage and was no fun at all.
So, who knows some good word games to play at home? Nothing too intellectual please, this is sunday-morning-in-bed kinda stuff.
It’s not really a word game, but Botticelli is big at my house. We don’t actually play by those rules exactly (we prefer longer games), but they’ll get you started.
A personal favorite of mine is ghost (which I used to play with my dad on walks when I was a kid).
The first person gives a letter. The second person gives another letter that will start to spell a word. You go back and forth – the first person to actually spell a word loses. If you think the other person is bluffing, you can challenge: if it’s a bluff, you win, if it’s not, you lose.
Sample game:
Player 1: C
Player 2: H
Player 1: O
Player 2: R
Player 1 stops and thinks. E (chore) is a straight loss. T, heading for “chortle,” will also lead to a loss; U, however, forces the other person into a corner, with “chorus.”
You’ve got to think ahead, but also be careful – if player 1 had been thinking of “choreography,” he or she would have inadvertantly spelled “chore” and lost. (Not that I’ve ever done that, of course.)
The one I play when I’m alone in the car – I look at the three-letter combos on license plates and try to come up with a word or words that have those letters in that order.
For instance, KPI would be sKePtIcal; SMP would be SMallPox, etc. If it’s a really easy combo, I’ll either do all the vowels (DLY: daily, delay, idly, dolly, duly) or, if it’s way too easy, all the consonants: I had ESS coming home tonight: bless, chess, dress, confess, ogress, helpless…
We used to play a game where we wrote two sentences vertically, side by side, then had to come up with celebrity names for each two-letter combination. This is much easier to show than to explain, so I will try to show - the sentences here are “every good boy does fine” and “today is the first day of the rest of your life” - btw, you stop when you run out of pairs, in this case at the F in “of”.
E T - Emma Thompson
V O - ?
E D - Ellen DeGeneres
R A - Richard Attenbrough
Y Y - ?
G I - Georgia Ingalls
O S - ?
O T - ?
D H - Dennis Hopper
B E
O F
Y I
D R
O S
E T
S D
F A
I Y
N O
E F
Set a time limit, or not as you please. Cross off any duplicates from your list and hers, and figure out who had more names. This is especially fun if you play the challenge version - for instance, in the above example I cheated and used Georgia Ingalls, whose name is ACTUALLY Georgia Engels. If your opponent challenges the name and is proven correct, you have to rub her back (or other forfeit as agreed on by both players.)
My family plays a rhyming game. The first person thinks of a word (say, gourd) and then thinks of a word that it rhymes with, and says “I’m thinking of the word that’s not bored.”
Then the second person thinks of words that rhyme with that word, but instead of just saying them has to describe them somehow. Goes like this:
“Is it two or more notes played simultaneously?”
“No, it’s not chord.”
“Is it the fiddly bits around Norway?”
“No, it’s not fjord.”
And so forth, until they guess it. Homonymns count, so gored would be the same as gourd.
Helenas sounds like a blast, I was laughing reading it.
Twickster, I am a pathological licence plater, my favourite being the beat up red Opel across the road that is not as RoXY as it’s plate suggests
Ghost sounds fun, but whats to stop the person saying Q, or less obviously M after CHOR ? I guess I missed something there?
As I understand it, that’s where the “bluff” part comes in. If you say “Q” and I call bluff, you’ve got to come up with the word you were heading for. If you can, I lose. If you can’t, I win.
Exapno, I’ve never tried Superghost. I’m a trained professional (editor of word puzzles), and that sounds really challenging. I’d have to go in training for a while before trying that.
LifeOnRye’s game also sounds like fun also – I’ll have to remember that one.
