Story writing games for adults

5 Fun Writing Games to Play While You’re Waiting for Inspiration to Strike — Chippewa Valley Writers Guild

Kensie Kiesow

Have you ever been in a mood to write, but you’re not sure what to write about? Maybe you’re stuck on an idea that’s going nowhere, or a plot that’s going somewhere, but you don’t like where it’s ended up. Or, maybe you’re bored and this whole writing thing is something different to pass the time. In any case, games are a great way to relieve any stress or anxiety that might be preventing you from working on the next Great American Novel (cue waving flag and fireworks). Creative people often get stuck in their heads about their projects and it’s difficult to escape that spiral, especially when a deadline is fast approaching. However, it’s important to take a step back from your work every now and then to give your brain something else to chew on for a while, so let’s play some games!

“Complete the Story”

This here game is the only one on this list that requires a group of writers (at least two, but the more the zanier!) and it can easily be adapted to a socially distant e-mail chain. Firstly, you will need a prompt. The more vague or ambiguous the prompt the better because then it opens each story up to multiple, vastly different interpretations, and we at the guild have found that prompts in the form of a picture or painting work wonders for this. Next, now that you’ve got a group of creative writers and an intriguing prompt, it’s time to start writing your stories. After each player has had a moment to divine a story from the selected prompt, they have three minutes of speed writing before passing the document onto the person next to them in a clockwise motion. If you wish to adapt this to a socially distanced, e-mail format, your group will have to devise a hypothetical circle around which to pass the documents. The number of rounds wherein your group passes the document is absolutely up to you and your group, but eventually, each story should be written to conclusion. Once the stories are completed and returned to their original writers, read them back to the group and try not to laugh!

“From Beginning to End”

For this game, pick two books from your bookshelf completely at random. With your eyes closed, flip through the pages of the first book until some intuition from deep in your gut tells you to stop, then with that same gut intuition and your eyes closed, pick a line at random. This line will be what starts your story. Now, turn to the second book you pulled and choose another line using the same search process. As I’m sure you can guess, this second line will be the last line of your story. Write the starting line at the top of a piece of paper and the ending line on the bottom and try to connect these two, completely random thoughts!

“The Pantoum”

Some poem formulas present unique creative challenges, like the sonnet or villanelle, which require a specific structure when written traditionally. Contemporary poetry writing has all but thrown propriety out the window, but sometimes returning to your grandparent’s age of poetry can be fun game to pass that unproductive time staring at a blank page. The pantoum form consists of four-line stanzas wherein the second and fourth lines of the first stanza become the first and third lines of the next stanza, and so on and so forth. Your poem can be however long you want, but in the last stanza, the pattern switches up. Instead, the third and first lines of the first stanza become the second and fourth lines of the last, so your poem should end with the beginning line. Sound complicated enough? If your answer is no and you’d like to take this poem a step further, steal four lines from your favorite song or poem and build the rest of your pantoum from there!

“Twenty-Six to One”

With one sheet of paper, write a story or poem wherein the first sentence or first line contains twenty-six words. No more, no less. As you write, knock off one more word from each sentence or line until you end up with just one word. If you’re writing a poem, you can use enjambment to cheat a little bit, but if you want to up the ante, try to make each line a complete sentence. Conversely, you could write a story that begins with a one-word sentence and grows to twenty-six!

“Dialogue”

Dialogue is notoriously difficult to write. There hasn’t been one writer in the history of the world who hasn’t, at some point, struggled with dialogue. It always sounds too unnatural or trite to their ears, so this game can provide you with a little no-stakes practice. Firstly, you’ll need three hats. Or, you could use envelopes, boxes, your friends’ purses, bowls, what have you, but you need three containers. Cut up a bunch of little slips of paper and write out as many places as you can think of in ten seconds and put them in the first hat. These could be rooms in your own house, a Macy’s, a national park, or the surface of the sun. Into the second hat, dump an equal number of slips on which you’ve written your characters: a mother and her son, three teen gal pals, a chicken and a goose, or a priest, rabbi, and monk. In the third and final hat, list some interesting topics like hiking in the Andes, dentistry, baking, Frankenstein, etc. Your topics can be anything you want, but make sure you can get a story out of it. Choose one slip of paper from each hat and write a scene about what happens using ONLY dialogue! Your dialogue must include a mention of the place in which the characters are talking as well as some action, body language, and most importantly, a narrative. Writing dialogue can be stressful, but practice makes perfect and games make practicing fun!

Now, go write!

Games to Play While Waiting for an Idea

Games to Play While Waiting for an Idea
Collected by Tim Wynne-Jones

Playing at writing is an important thing to do. You probably came to write because you liked to do it. Okay, yes – you want to be rich and famous and have interesting friends. But you like writing a lot. A hockey player who works his way up through the ranks of junior hockey hopes to play in the NHL one day, but apart from skill and strength and grim determination, he has to love the game. It’s fun! Same goes for writing. The work of writing grows out of the enjoyment of stick-handling words, passing words, zinging words into the net. You will never be able to write twelve drafts of a novel if you didn’t enjoy the first, rough, casting-about part of the process. It is my great hope that the work involved in writing doesn’t even occur to a person until s/he is already so far along in the pleasurable task of putting words and sentences together in original and amusing and striking ways; that the work is well worth the effort to get it right. But I digress. When the ideas aren’t flowing you can prime the pump. Here are some games I have discovered along the way.

1. A Poem of Your Name
Poet and teacher Birk Sproxton told me this idea almost thirty years ago. Using only the letters in your own name, write a poem. Don’t cheat; if you only have one E in your name you can’t make the word “feet.” If you want to spell creatively…well, that’s another matter; afterall, making up words is a writer’s prerogative. If you’ve got middle names, now is the time to be thankful for them. I knew a seventh-grade student who found Smashing Pumpkins in her name! I say poem, but I use the term loosely. You make a list of words and then use them as well as you can. The thing is, the result will always sound poetic by dint of its highly alliterative content. (See Stephen’s poem in the chapter “Me, Myself and Why” in my book, Stephen Fair.)

2. The Creature in You
For some reason, everyone has at least one animal in his or her name. Though it may be nothing more than a lowly ant or a cat, we nominally carry about these spirit animals. I personally can find a: tom, tit, moth, sow and joey in my name. Then there is the fantastic yeti and the even more fantastic wymth. The yeti already exists in legend, if nowhere else; the wymth has only just this minute been discovered. I wonder what he is like, where he lives, what he eats?

3. Your Name as an Acronymic Sentence
Sometimes in a classroom one sees this: a kid’s name written down the left hand side of the page and a list of adjectives beside it. Try to write a sentence, instead. Here am I acronymically: Today Is More Of Tomorrow’s Hopeful Yesterdays. String together acronymic sentences of ten of your family or friends’ names. Try to make it into a unified piece.

4. The List Poem
I learned this mesmerizing exercise from the Toronto poet, Stuart Mills. Write a poem in which every line begins with the same phrase; for instance, try one of these:
         They buried
         I remember
         When the starship landed
         There is no

5. A Poem in Your Phone Number
This comes courtesy of my writer friend Kathi Appelt. Write your phone number down the left hand side of a page and write a poem, in which each line contains as many words as the number opposite it. “0” can be no words, a poignantly empty line. When Kathi does it, a zero counts as a wild card.

6. Metaphors and Similes.
Metaphors are how we think. Metaphors are how language came about in the first place. A metaphor is the words we find when we have no word for something. The power of an original metaphor cannot be underestimated in good writing, but too often the lazy writer opts for the handy, trite phrase.
Generate a list of ten well-worn metaphors: Life is no bed of roses, He isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, He was the kingpin of the operation, she was a fox, et cetera. Now replace each well-worn metaphor with one of your own that conveys more or less the same meaning.
Do the same thing with a series of trite similes. He laughed like a hyena, she played like an angel, they ran like the wind, the stars twinkled like diamonds, et cetera. How about the stars twinkled like hyenas? Have fun with this!

7. Twenty-six to one
Write a story in which the first sentence contains twenty-six words and each subsequent sentence has one words less. You can stand this game on its head and write a story that begins with one word. This is a wonderful way to get to know what a sentence is or might be. The story will, inevitably, be totally nonsensical. My twenty-six-to-one book On Tumbledown Hill makes some sense and rhymes, too, but it took over six years to write!

8. The Lipogram
A lipogram is a composition that contains no instances of a particular letter of the alphabet. It’s easy enough if you decide to write a lipogram not using the letter Z, for instance, but try writing a composition where you never use the letter E. There are entire lipographic novels out there without a single E in them. Here’s an excerpt from Ernest Wright’s Gadsby.
         Upon this basis I am going to show you how a bunch of
         bright young folks did find a champion; a man with boys
         and girls of his own; a man of so dominating and happy
         individuality that Youth is drawn to him as is a fly to a
         sugar bowl…

9. The Univocalic
Christian Bok’s award winning book of poetry, Eunoia takes the lipogram to new levels of insane deliciousness. The book is a series of univocalics, which means compositions that use only one vowel. The word Eunoia means beautiful thinking and just happens to be the shortest English word to contain all five vowels. Here’s an example from the book:
         Scows from London go to Moscow, not to Boston, to drop
         off bolts of mothproof cloth: wool for long johns, wool for work
         socks.

10. Pangrams
A sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet. The best known pangram in English is, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” The fun is in trying to have as little duplication of letters as possible. The ultimate pangram would be 26 letters long. Here’s one: “Veldt jynx grimps waqf zho buck.” I’ve been able to track down all of these words in a large dictionary but have no idea what the sentence means. Here is one that’s not so short but paints a lively picture: “Curious and wily journalists braved the fury of the six brazen knaves picketing the mad queen.”

11. Verbal Remedies
This is an exercise that will help you to energize a sentence by using more imaginative verbs. It is borrowed from Natalie Goldberg’s fine book, Writing Down the Bone: Freeing the Writer Within, Shambhala Publications, 1986. You’ll find it in the chapter entitled, “the Action of a Sentence.”
Fold a sheet of paper in half. On the left side list ten nouns. Any ten (other than proper nouns). Anything that pops into your head. Turn the paper over. Think of an occupation, for example: carpenter, doctor, cook. List fifteen verbs that apply to that occupation. Open the page and try joining the nouns with any of the verbs to make interesting sentences. You can cast the verbs in the past tense if you need to.

12. The Pantoum
This is a poetic form consisting of four line stanzas. The second and fourth lines of the first stanza become the first and third line of the next stanza, and so on. The poem can be of any length but in the final stanza the pattern changes. The third and first line of the original verse become the second and fourth line of the last, so that the pantoum ends exactly as it began.
You can get a kick-start by borrowing four lines of poetry from a poem or song lyric. Try it with the first quatrain of She Loves You, by the Beatles. Or try it with something a little more challenging. Here are a few verses of a pantoum I wrote using the first four lines of Billy Collin’s wonderful poem, “On Turning Ten,” which can be found in his collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Random House 2001.

         The whole idea of it makes me feel
         like I’m coming down with something,
         something worse than any stomach ache
         or the headaches I get from reading in bad light –

         Like I’m coming down with something
         the world chained to my ankle, a mafia death-warrant,
         or the headaches I get from reading in bad light –
         cracking, splitting. Condemned; a corpse in training

         The world chained to my ankle, a mafia death warrant,
         a concrete promise there is no hope of
         cracking, splitting. Condemned; a corpse in training
         and just when I was learning to fly.

I am no poet. The subtlety of Collins’s poem is lost in my pantoum, but by the third stanza above, all the words are mine, for better or worse. It’s as if the opening stanza (the found words) is a launching pad. The second verse is half his, half mine, and then…I’m on my own.
It is important, of course, to realize that such a poem cannot be published if it includes copyrighted material. That isn’t the point. The point is to venture into unknown worlds from a particularly springy launch site.

13. Tops & Tails
Many intrepid writers make a regular point of attacking the empty page in timed exercises where they do not lift their pens for some predetermined number of minutes. The idea is not to think too much, not to pause or scratch out or worry about grammar or spelling, but just to let the words pour from one’s unconscious, more or less out of control. That’s good. Your unconscious is your writing buddy and the more chance s/he gets to spew without your conscious mind editing, the better.
Here’s a modified version of this kind of spewing, which includes an element of play. Go to the bookshelf and take down two books at random. Open the first and, with your eyes closed, place your finger on the page. Whatever sentence Peter Pointer lands on is your first sentence, to be written at the top of an 8 X 11 sheet of paper. Play the same blind game in choosing a final sentence from the other book and write this one at the bottom of the sheet. Now endeavor to join these disparate thoughts.
I can’t resist trying it. Not the exercise but the choosing of the sentences. Here goes:
Ever had an argument with your nose? …
… She reached out to touch the wall beside her, but there was no wall.

Thank you Richard Scrimger. Thank you Sarah Ellis. Hmmm. How do I write a page of text connecting these two thoughts?

14. Point of View
One of the great decisions one has to make in telling a story is from whose point of view are you seeing the story unfold. Sometimes the story comes to you complete with narrator; other times it’s up for grabs. Here is a writing exercise that shows how different an event becomes depending on your vantage point. Choose any point of view you like and retell this story (Or as much of it as you care to.)
         Hey, Diddle, diddle,
         The cat and the fiddle,
         The cow jumped over the moon.
         The little dog laughed,
         To see such sport
         And the dish ran away with the spoon.
If you want to up the ante, try telling the story found in Genesis 22: 1-13. Not from the Biblical omniscient (all seeing) POV but from the POV of Isaac, let’s say. Or maybe the goat?

15. Dialogue
Into a handy hat (or large envelope or what have you) place a goodly number of venues written out on little slips of paper. For instance: laundromat, jungle gym, space capsule, kitchen, convenience store, etcetera. Into a second hat place an equal number of groupings: three nine-year-olds; a boy and his father; a teenager, a golfer and a pigeon; a teacher and an alien; etcetera. Finally, into a third hat, place a list of topics: hamburgers, Pride and Prejudice, teeth, towels, sex. Choose one slip of paper from each hat and write a scene. Do not forget to include the venue in your dialogue. Make sure you include action. And do not forget to show the conversation, especially the body language. Aim for a good balance of actual talk and narrative connective tissue. The balance will shift depending on how easy-going the conversation is or how urgent it becomes. (I imagine, for instance, that a chat between a golfer and a pigeon about towels in a convenience store might become very heated. )

16. Words of One Syllable
This is borrowed from my writer friend Alison McGhee. Empty the three hats you were using in exercise 15, above, and into one, place a number of slips of paper with scenes on them as in: a child and an adult in a room; an old man and a dog on a porch; a teacher and a student on a desert island, etcetera. Into the second hat place a bunch of points of view: first, second, third, omniscient. In the final hat throw in some tenses: past, present, future. Pick a slip from each hat and create a scene written entirely in words of one syllable.

17. Chronology
This is another of Alison McGhee’s wonderful writing exercises. Most stories are told in linear, chronological progression, from point A to Point B to Point C, never backtracking, never jumping ahead. But what if you begin the story in the present, flash back, and then push on until you arrive again in the present (CABC)? Or begin in the present, flash forward, flash backward, and then return to the present (BCAB)? Go backwards (CBA)? Or how about a story told in the present with a series of flashbacks (BABABAC)?
From that good old hat pick one of the non-linear chronological orders mentioned above and rewrite Jack and the Beanstalk.

18. Breaking the Glass
Take a passage of your own writing that you’re not all that pleased with. Bad writing or – worse – pedestrian writing. (Alternately, you can cut out a paragraph from a magazine.) Cut the offending passage up into sentences. Throw the sentences into a hat and then draw them out again randomly and put them back together in the new order. Any better?
Try this, next: take the same sentences and cut them up into three parts, which, in a simple sentence, will mean subject verb, object, but in a complex sentence could be anything – cut it as you please. Place these bits into three hats and then randomly take a bit from each hat and put your “story” back together.
And you thought it was bad to begin with?
Actually, this exercise can often unlock a piece of prose. (And often the culprit is boring verbs!)
I remember a friend working on a difficult violin passage turning the music upside down and trying to play the same bar. It helped. Last time I heard he was playing first violin for the San Francisco Opera.

19. Landscape is Never Simply Landscape
One of the great books on writer’s craft is John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. This is an exercise cribbed from there but slanted towards someone writing for children.
         Describe a lake as seen by a boy or a girl who is in love. Do not mention love or the beloved.
         Here’s a variant. Describe a garden as seen by a child whose pet dog just died. Do not mention the dog or death. And, for that matter, don’t mention a grave.
         This is really a lesson in tone. It’s also a lesson in what T.S. Eliot called the objective correlative. Eliot considered the objective correlative “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art.” That sounds pretty important. What does he mean? Well, in the examples above, you could write: “Patty was really in love with Gord.” Or “Nathaniel was really going to miss ol’ Patch. ” Such sentences evoke nothing, express no emotion. But how can a lake or a garden tell us of love or loss? Well, think of how bleak the world looks when you’re sad, even if the sun is shining. Now do you get it? In fact, a really good exercise would be to describe a lake as seen by a boy or girl who is in love. And then describe a lake as seen by a boy or a girl who just killed someone. The lake will not be the same.

20. Conditions
This is a game I used to occupy myself with, endlessly, when I was in my twenties and the idea of writing a novel seemed utterly impossible but awfully desirable. String together a series of very brief vivid descriptions of settings that seem charged with significance. Link each setting with one detail or another. I call the game Conditions because the vignettes seem to be circumstances worthy of exploring – disparate fragments of a puzzle that might inspire further enquiry. Really, you are just stringing the reader along since you have no idea how these parts fit together. It’s something Edward Gorey did a lot of. Also, one thinks of Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. Or the way Stephen King starts his novels by introducing you to a character in a bizarre situation then jumping to several other characters, also in compromising or difficult situations. You know they are a “special” group; you know they are going to come together. But whether the conditions in this exercise lead anywhere or not, leaps are a good thing to know about – to practice. Sometimes I will worry away at a piece of writing for pages and pages trying to get my protagonist from point A to point B in a “meaningful way,” and then end up just putting him there. Think of the way scenes in movies are spliced together. Here’s an example of a string of conditions I wrote when I was much younger.

A bottle with a message in it washes up on a desert island only to be trapped in the bleached ribcage of a dead man. A tattered flag is attached to the skeleton’s wrist.

In a Paris flat overlooking the Seine, a quill pen lies on a sheet of paper. The window above the desk is open, the curtain flaps in the breeze. The paper stirs but a ship in a bottle acts as a paperweight. The flag on the tiny ship is the same as the one on the skeleton’s wrist.

In a garden on the Dorset coast, a small girl pricks her finger on a bramble bush. Ink drips from the cut – ink the same colour as the flag. It begins to spell a name on her snow-white skirt.
Etcetera…

Part of what this exercise helps to do is get you into the habit of exploring a scene like a camera, from a distance, or mid range, and then zoooooming in for that extreme close-up. It has been said that detail is the life-blood of good fiction. This is an exercise to get you thinking into an image, like a detective closing in on a clue.

Fairy tale box. Storytelling game

WHAT IS A BOX OF FAIRIES?

Arguably the best imaginative and storytelling board game in the galaxy.

The meaning of the game is to tell a story. And it's not so easy, because your character will travel through a bizarre world, get into strange places and unforeseen situations, and get out of them with the help of random items. Where you will go, what you will have at hand, who you will meet on the way - the cube, the "roulette of fate" and chance will decide, almost like in life. Your task is to weave a wonderful web of history out of all this and not get confused in it yourself. And you will need fantasy and mastery of the word.

You can play both together and in a large company, and of course, you can and should - with children. The party can last from half an hour to the whole evening. The age of the players is from 5 to 99. The rules are simple and flexible, the scope for creativity is almost endless.

The mechanics of The Box of Fairy Tales are designed to create a situation for the development of natural creativity without limiting the freedom of expression. It is inherent in competitiveness - but without a subjective assessment of the "quality" of fairy tales; focus on a friendly atmosphere and support during the game - but also the opportunity to "put a pig" on a partner; an element of chance - but thoughtfulness and balance.

I want to buy!

What does a game consist of?

Game board cards

20 very different locations. From them, a map of your history is compiled - from all (if you are not in a hurry) or from only a few. The characters will travel along it. The colorful illustrations are created according to the Wimmelbuch principle, with many details. They set a fabulous atmosphere and become starting points to the worlds of your imagination.

Characters

26 figures on stands - the characters of your future stories. What will you become today - a princess or a witch? Knight or Rogue? Or maybe a dwarf or a fairy? Or an alien monster?
You can choose your favorite heroes, give them names and give them any character properties (but remember that these properties will have to affect the game and the behavior of your character).

Items

80 tokens with items. The player who manages to use the items he got in his fairy tale receives additional points.

Stuff

Destiny Roulette - indicates what will happen to the character on the playing field during his turn.

Cube - determines where you will go (forward, backward or stay in place).

Hourglass - counts the time of the move, helping you to focus on the most important and not be distracted by trifles.

Number of players

from 2 to 10

Party

from 30 minutes to the whole evening

Age0003

Storytelling is an ancient, wonderful art, accessible to everyone, but almost forgotten today. This is a way of creative understanding and transformation of the world, inherent in man from time immemorial. We would very much like to see it revived and developed.

I want to!

More details

This game helped me come up with the best of my true stories.
I swear by my cocked hat!

Carl Friedrich Jerome
von Munchausen

Baron

If I had this game, I would tell fairy tales for at least 5000 nights in a row!

Scheherazade

princess

If you use this game to compose fairy tales, you will definitely not be able to fall asleep!

Ole Lukoye

storyteller

Who is our game for?

For inveterate dreamers and inventors — it will become the favorite leisure activity

For mothers — will help tell kids bedtime stories

For children from 5 years old — will develop creativity in the child, out-of-the-box thinking, and of course, speech

For creative people — will inspire new ideas

For everyone who would like to learn how to invent and tell - it will help to "wake up" their imagination and learn to build a story

For connoisseurs of board games - will become a "chip" of the collection

What develops and what will it be useful for?

Develops creativity, imagination, the ability to think creatively and outside the box

Develops oral speech, the ability to build a coherent narrative

Can serve as an excellent tool for language development in bilingual children, as well as for learning a foreign language 903

Helps the child to live through emotions and fears in a playful way, work through stressful situations. It will become an indispensable tool in psychological work with children, fairy tale therapy and art therapy

UNFORTUNATELY, THE CIRCULATION OF THE GAME IS ENDED AND IT IS NOT AVAILABLE NOW :(

We don't know yet when there will be a new circulation, and whether there will be at all.
If you want to sign up for the waiting list, leave your details in the form below — we will definitely notify you when the game is available for sale.0003
You can find out all the details about it and order it on the website of our publishing house papermagic.ru

Buy!

Click to order

Word games • Arzamas

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Children's room ArzamasMaterials
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“Ene, bene, slave, kvanter, manter, toad”: what does it all mean

“Hat”, “telegrams”, “MPS” and other games that require almost nothing but company and a desire to spend time properly

Author Lev Gankin
Primer “A. B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861 Wikimedia Commons
Oral games

Associations

Game for a big company. The host briefly leaves the room, during which time the rest decide which of those present they will guess (this may be the host himself). Upon returning, the player asks the others questions - what flower do you associate this person with, what vehicle, what part of the body, what kitchen utensils, etc. - in order to understand who is hidden. Questions can be very different - this is not limited by anything other than the imagination of the players. Since associations are an individual matter and an exact match may not happen here, it is customary to give the guesser two or three attempts. If the company is small, you can expand the circle of mutual acquaintances who are not present at that moment in the room, although the classic version of "associations" is still a hermetic game.

Game of P

A game for a company of four people, an interesting variation on the "hat" theme (see below), but does not require any special accessories. One player guesses a word to another, which he must explain to the others, but he can only use words starting with the letter "p" (any, except for the same root). That is, the word "house" will have to be explained, for example, as follows: "I built - I live." If you couldn’t guess right away, you can throw up additional associations: “building, premises, space, the simplest concept ...” And at the end add, for example, “Perignon” - by association with Dom Perignon champagne. If the guessers are close to winning, then the facilitator will need comments like “about”, “approximately”, “almost right” - or, in the opposite situation: “bad, wait!”. Usually, after the word is guessed, the explainer comes up with a new word and whispers it into the ear of the guesser - he becomes the next leader.

Lectures for children on this topic:

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Primer "A. B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861 Wikimedia Commons
Say the Same Thing

An upbeat and fast-paced game for two, named after a video clip by the inventive rock band OK Go, from which many people learned about it (the musicians even developed a mobile application that helps to play it from a distance, although it is currently unavailable). The meaning of the game is that on the count of one-two-three each of the players pronounces a randomly chosen word. Further, the goal of the players is, with the help of successive associations, to come to a common denominator: for the next time, two or three, both pronounce a word that is somehow connected with the previous two, and so on until the desired coincidence occurs. Suppose the first player said the word "house" and the second player said the word "sausage"; in theory, they can coincide very soon, if on the second move after one-two-three both say "store". But if one says “shop”, and the other says “refrigerator” (why not a sausage house?), then the game can drag on, especially since it’s impossible to repeat - neither the store nor the refrigerator will fit, and you will have to think, say, before "refrigerator" or "IKEI". If the original words are far from each other (for example, "curb" and "weightlessness"), then the gameplay becomes completely unpredictable.

Characters

A game for the company (the ideal number of players is from four to ten), which requires from the participants not only a good imagination, but also, preferably, a little bit of acting skills. As usual, one of the players briefly leaves the room, and while he is gone, the rest come up with a word, the number of letters in which matches the number of participants remaining in the room. Next, the letters are distributed among the players, and a character is invented for each of them (therefore, words that contain "b", "s" or "b" do not fit). Until the word is guessed, the players behave in accordance with the chosen character - the leader's task is to understand exactly what characters his partners portray and restore the hidden word. Imagine, for example, that a company consists of seven people. One leaves, the rest come up with a six-letter word "old man" and distribute roles among themselves: the first, say, will be with indoor, the second - t erpel, the third - a secondary, the fourth - p asylum, the fifth - and mane and sixth - to ovary. The returning player is greeted by a cacophony of voices - the company "lives" their roles until they are unraveled, and the host asks the players questions that help reveal their image. The only condition is that as soon as the presenter pronounces the correct character - for example, guesses the insidious one - he must admit that his incognito has been revealed and announce the number of his letter (in the word "old man" - the sixth).
Primer "A. B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861 Wikimedia Commons
Recognize the song

A game for a company of four to five people. The host leaves, and the remaining players choose a well-known song and distribute its words among themselves - each word. For example, the song “Let there always be sun” is guessed: one player gets the word “let”, the second - “always”, the third - “will be”, the fourth - “sun”. The host returns and begins to ask questions - the most varied and unexpected: "What is your favorite city?", "Where does the Volga flow?", "What to do and who is to blame?". The task of the respondents is to use their own word in the answer and try to do it in such a way that it does not stand out too much; you need to answer quickly and not very extensively, but not necessarily truthfully. Answers to questions in this case can be, for example, “It’s hard for me to choose one city, but let today it will be Rio de Janeiro" or "Volga - into the Caspian, but this does not happen always , every third year it flows into the Black". The presenter must catch which word is superfluous in the answer and guess the song. They often play with lines from poetry rather than from songs.

Tip

A game for four people divided into pairs (in principle, there can be three or four pairs). The mechanics is extremely simple: the first player from the first pair whispers a word (a common noun in the singular) into the ear of the first player from the second pair, then they must take turns calling their associations with this word (in the same form - common nouns; cognate words cannot be used ). After each association, the teammate of the player who voiced it calls out his word, trying to guess if it was originally guessed - and so on, until the problem is solved by someone; at the same time, all associations already sounded in the game can be used in the future, adding one new one at each move. For example, suppose there are players A and B on one team, and C and D on the other. Player A whispers the word "old man" into player C's ear. Player C says aloud to his partner D: "age". If D immediately answers "old man", then the pair of C and D scores a point, but if he says, for example, "youth", then the move goes to player A, who, using the word "age" suggested by C (but discarding the irrelevant to the case "youth" from D), says to his partner B: "age, man." Now B will probably guess the old man - and his team with A will already earn a point. But if he says "teenager" (thinking that it is about the age when boys turn into men), then C, to whom the move suddenly returned, will say " age, man, eightieth birthday”, and here, probably, “old man” will be guessed. In one of the variants of the game, it is also allowed to "shout": this means that, having suddenly guessed what was meant, the player can shout out the option not on his turn. If he guessed right, his team will get a point, but if he rushed to conclusions, the team will lose a point. They usually play up to five points.
Primer "A. B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861 Wikimedia Commons
IPU

Game for a big company. Here we are forced to warn readers that, having seen this text in full, you will never be able to drive again - the game is one-time.

Spoiler →

First, the player who gets to drive leaves the room. When he returns, he must find out what MPS means - all that is known in advance is that the bearer of this mysterious abbreviation is present in the room right now. To find out the correct answer, the driver can ask other players questions, the answers to which should be formulated as “yes” or “no”: “Does he have blond hair?”, “Does he have blue eyes?”, “Is this a man?”, “He in jeans?", "Does he have a beard?"; moreover, each question is asked to a specific player, and not to all at once. Most likely, it will quickly become clear that there is simply no person in the room who meets all the criteria; Accordingly, the question arises, according to what principle the players give answers. "Opening" this principle will help answer the main question - what is MPS. The Ministry of Railways is not the Ministry of Communications at all, but m oy p equal s seated (that is, each player always describes the person sitting to his right). Another option is COP, to then to answered to last (that is, everyone talks about who answered the previous question).

Contact

A simple game that can be played with a group of three or more people. One thinks of a word (noun, common noun, singular) and calls its first letter aloud, the task of the others is to guess the word, remembering other words with this letter, asking questions about them and checking if the presenter guessed. The facilitator's task is not to reveal the next letters in the word to the players for as long as possible. For example, a word with the letter "d" is guessed. One of the players asks the question: “Is this by chance not the place where we live?” This is where the fun begins: the host must figure out as quickly as possible what the player means and say “No, this is not“ house ”” (well, or, if it was a“ house ”, honestly admit it). But in parallel, other players also think the same thing, and if they understand what “house” means before the leader, then they say: “contact” or “there is contact”, and start counting up to ten in chorus (while the count is going on, the presenter still has a chance to escape and guess what it is about!), and then they call the word. If at least two matched, that is, at the expense of ten they said “house” in chorus, the presenter must reveal the next letter, and the new guesser version will already begin with the now known letters “d” + the next one. If it was not possible to beat the host on this question, then the guessers offer a new option. Of course, it makes sense to complicate the definitions, and not ask everything directly - so the question about "home" would sound better like "Is this not where the sun rises?" (with a reference to the famous song "House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals). Usually, the one who eventually gets to the searched word (names it or asks a question leading to victory) becomes the next leader.
Primer "A. B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861 Wikimedia Commons
Writing games

Encyclopedia

Not the fastest, but extremely exciting game for a company of four people - you will need pens, paper and some kind of encyclopedic dictionary (preferably not limited thematically - that is, TSB is better than a conditional "biological encyclopedia"). The host finds a word in the encyclopedia that is unknown to anyone present (here it remains to rely on their honesty - but cheating in this game is uninteresting and unproductive). The task of each of the players is to write an encyclopedic definition of this word, inventing its meaning from the head and, if possible, disguising the text as a real small encyclopedic article. The presenter, meanwhile, carefully rewrites the real definition from the encyclopedia. After that, the “articles” are shuffled and read out by the presenter in random order, including the real one, and the players vote for which option seems most convincing to them. In the end, the votes are counted and points are distributed. Any player receives a point for correctly guessing the real definition and one more point for each vote given by other participants to his own version. After that, the sheets are distributed back and a new word is played out - there should be about 6-10 of them in total. You can also play this game in teams: come up with imaginary definitions collectively. The game "poems" is arranged in a similar way - but instead of a compound word, the host selects two lines from some little-known poem in advance and invites the participants to add quatrains.

Game from Inglourious Basterds

A game for a company of any size that many knew before the Quentin Tarantino film, but it does not have a single name. Each player invents a role for his neighbor (usually it is some famous person), writes it on a piece of paper and sticks the piece of paper on his neighbor's forehead: accordingly, everyone sees what role someone has, but does not know who they are. The task of the participants is, with the help of leading questions, the answers to which are formulated as “yes” or “no” (“Am I a historical figure?”, “Am I a cultural figure?”, “Am I a famous athlete?”), to find out who exactly they are. In this form, however, the game exhausts itself rather quickly, so you can come up with completely different themes and instead of famous people play, for example, in professions (including exotic ones - "carousel", "taxidermist"), in film and literary heroes (you can mix them with real celebrities, but it’s better to agree on this in advance), food (one player will be risotto, and the other, say, green cabbage soup) and even just items.
Primer "A. B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861 Wikimedia Commons
Bulls and cows

A game for two: one participant thinks of a word, and it is agreed in advance how many letters should be in it (usually 4-5). The task of the second is to guess this word by naming other four- or five-letter words; if some letters of the named word are in the hidden one, they are called cows, and if they have the same place inside the word, then these are bulls. Let's imagine that the word "eccentric" is conceived. If the guesser says “dot”, then he receives an answer from the second player: “three cows” (that is, the letters “h”, “k” and “a”, which are in both “eccentric” and “dot”, but in different places). If he then says "head of head", he will no longer get three cows, but two cows and one bull - since the letter "a" in both "eccentric" and "head" is in the fourth position. As a result, sooner or later, it is possible to guess the word, and the players can change places: now the first one will guess the word and count the bulls and cows, and the second one will name his options and track the extent to which they coincide with the one guessed. You can also complicate the process by simultaneously guessing your own word and guessing the opponent's word.

Intellect

Writing game for the company (but you can also play together), consisting of three rounds, each for five minutes. In the first, players randomly type thirteen letters (for example, blindly poking a book page with their finger) and then form words from them, and only long ones - from five letters. In the second round, you need to choose a syllable and remember as many words as possible that begin with it, you can use single-root ones (for example, if the syllable "house" is selected, then the words "house", "domra", "domain", "domain", "brownie", "housewife", etc.). Finally, in the third round, the syllable is taken again, but now you need to remember not ordinary words, but the names of famous people of the past and present in which it appears, and not necessarily at the beginning - that is, both Karamzin and McCartney will fit the syllable "kar" , and, for example, Hamilcar. An important detail: since this round provokes the most disputes and scams, game participants can ask each other to prove that this person is really a celebrity, and here you need to remember at least the profession and country. Typical dialogue: "What, you don't know Hamilcar? But this is a Carthaginian commander!” After each round, points are counted: if a particular word is the same for all players, it is simply crossed out, in other cases, players are awarded as many points for it as the opponents could not remember it. In the first round, you can still add points for especially long words. Based on the results of the rounds, it is necessary to determine who took the first, second, third and other places, and add up these places at the end of the game. The goal is to get the smallest number at the output (for example, if you were the winners of all three rounds, then you will get the number 3 - 1 + 1 + 1, and you are the champion; less cannot be purely mathematical).
Primer "A. B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861 Wikimedia Commons
Frame

A game for any number of people, which was invented by one of the creators of the Kaissa chess program and the author of the anagram search program Alexander Bitman. First, the players choose several consonants - this will be the frame, the skeleton of the word. Then the time is recorded (two or three minutes), and the players begin to “stretch” vowels (as well as “й”, “ь”, “ъ”) onto the frame to make existing words. Consonants can be used in any order, but only once, and vowels can be added in any number. For example, players choose the letters "t", "m", "n" - then the words "fog", "cloak", "mantle", "coin", "darkness", "ataman", "dumbness" and other. The winner is the one who can come up with more words (as usual, these should be common nouns in the singular). The game can be played even with one letter, for example, "l". The words “silt”, “lay”, “yula”, “aloe”, “spruce” are formed around it, and if we agree that the letter can be doubled, “alley” and “lily”. If the standard "framework" is mastered, then the task may be to compose a whole phrase with one consonant: a textbook example from the book by Evgeny Gik - "Bobby, kill the boy and beat the woman at the baobab."

Chain of words

Game for any number of players. Many people know it under the name "How to make an elephant out of a fly", and it was invented by the writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll, the author of "Alice". The “chain” is based on metagram words, that is, words that differ by only one letter. The task of the players is to turn one word into another with the least number of intermediate links. For example, let's make a "goat" from a "fox": FOX - LINDE - PAW - KAPA - KARA - KORA - GOAT. It is interesting to give tasks with a plot: so that the “day” turns into “night”, the “river” becomes the “sea”. The well-known chain, where the "elephant" grows out of the "fly", is obtained in 16 moves: FLY - MURA - TURA - TARA - KARA - KARE - CAFE - KAFR - MURDER - KAYUK - HOOK - URIK - LESSON - TERM - DRAIN - STON - ELEPHANT (example of Evgeny Gik). For training, you can compete in the search for metagrams for any word. For example, the word "tone" gives "sleep", "background", "current", "tom", "tan" and so on - whoever scores more options wins.
Primer "A. B. C. Trim, alphabet enchanté. Illustrations by Bertal. France, 1861 Wikimedia Commons
Hat

A game for a company of four people, requiring simple equipment: pens, paper and a “hat” (an ordinary plastic bag will do). Sheets of paper need to be torn into small pieces and distributed to the players, the number of pieces depends on how many people are playing: the larger the company, the less for each. Players write words on pieces of paper (one for each piece of paper) and throw them into the "hat". There are also options here - you can play just with words (noun, common noun, singular), or you can play with famous people or literary characters. Then the participants are divided into teams - two or more people each; the task of each - in 20 seconds (or 30, or a minute - the timing can be set at your own choice) to explain to your teammates the largest number of words arbitrarily pulled out of the "hat", without using the same root. If the driver could not explain a word, it returns to the hat and will be played by the other team. At the end of the game, the words guessed by different representatives of the same team are summed up, their number is counted, and the team that has more pieces of paper is awarded the victory. A popular version of the game: everything is the same, but in the first round the players explain the words (or describe the characters) orally, in the second round they show in pantomime, in the third round they explain the same words in one word. And recently a board game has appeared, where you need not only to explain and show, but also to draw.

Telegrams

Game for any number of players. The players choose a word, for each letter of which they will need to come up with a part of the telegram - the first letter will be the beginning of the first word, the second - the second, and so on. For example, the word "fork" is selected. Then the following message can become a telegram: “The camel is healed. I'm flying a crocodile. Aibolit". Another round of the game is the addition of genres. Each player gets the task to write not one, but several telegrams from the same word - business, congratulatory, romantic (the types of messages are agreed in advance). Telegrams are read aloud, the next word is chosen.

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