Silly Games – The Puke Game July 27, 2008

One cool summer night at the Black Hills Playhouse, the stone-walled room under the snack bar (“the Pit”) was filled with people watching or playing in the Texas Hold-Em finals, a culmination of a summer’s worth of poker nights. I was sitting next to my friend Jeff, and we were ruthlessly trying to distract the players during a hand. Our buddy Valerie has a notoriously weak stomach, and so the Puke Game was born.

The script of the game, if Jeff and I are playing:

Me: “Hey, did you have any of that cottage cheese at lunch today?”

Jeff: “Yeah, why do you ask?”

Me: “I don’t know. [Pause.] Did it smell weird to you?”

Jeff: “I guess, now that you mention it, but I’m sure it was fine.”

Me: “You look a little funny. Are you feeling all right?”

Jeff: “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Then Jeff’s job is to go through the pre-sick gestures, all the while denying that anything’s wrong. My job is to keep pressing to make sure he’s all right. Everyone who plays this game has different opening moves, but they usually include heavy sighing, a lot of swallowing, casual spitting, and holding their hands to their face.

Memorable playing styles include Kato’s “What If You’re Lying Down?”, Tyler’s “One-Too-Many Birthday Shots” (that one was a true work of art) and Niles’s “Can’t Run Away Quickly Enough.”

Hey, are you okay?

For the record, Valerie was a rock through our ridiculous behavior. I’m pretty sure she even won the hand.

Silly Games – What Movie is This Rushmore Quote From? July 22, 2008

This is one I play with my brother. He is really really good at guessing the right answer.

Me: “Oh yeah, with friends like you, who needs friends?!”
Brother: “Uh, Rushmore?”
Me: “YEAH!”
Brother: “One more!”
Me: “So we both have dead people in our family.”
Brother: “Oh, man… um…. Oh! Rushmore.”
Me: “You are awesome at this game.”

Silly Games – Binocular Attack July 22, 2008

This is one for the ages.

1. Set someone up in a lawnchair.

2. Give them a pair of binoculars.

3. Back up about thirty feet and have them look at you through the binoculars.

4. Run up to them and pretend to punch them a couple of times when you’re about ten feet off.

If you’re lucky, they’ll fall out of the chair.

Silly Games – The Dictionary Game March 3, 2008

In college, I lived with a house full of amazing and ridiculous people. We had a painter, a playwright, a poet, a literary critic, and little old me. This led to a number of outrageous projects.

One day I found myself armed with a rather abridged paperback dictionary (this happens way more often than I oughta admit), and one thing kinda just led to another. This then, is the Dictionary Game.

The object of the game is to define all of the words on a page. If you can, you get to sign the page at the top.

1. One person is the reader, another the guesser. Anyone else around can see the definition, but they cannot help guess!

2. The guesser names a letter, and the reader stops at the first page they get to within that letter. The guesser’s initials are written at the bottom of the page.

3. The reader calls off one word at a time, skipping proper nouns ’cause that’s just going too far. The guesser gets to ask as many yes or no questions as they want.

4. If the word has more than one definition, the reader skims through and tells the guesser how many they’re going to have to dredge up. It’s almost never as many as the dictionary lists, unless the reader is a jerk.

5. If the guesser gives up, the reader draws a line before the word that finally took them down. You know, for posterity.

6. If the guesser gets a definition verbatim – this really does happen sometimes – the reader marks some kind of happy symbol beside it.

7. If the guesser clears the page, they get to sign the top. And maybe name the page, if any weird kind of theme emerged.

Hints:

- The Dictionary Game is completely about tenacity, not word-nerdiness. Although the nerdiness can help.

- You can also play it in reverse, where a player gets a definition and then has to name the word. The guesser almost always has to sing the alphabet song at some point, which is just nice for everyone.

- In our worn-out dictionary, we also checked off words we looked up, and recorded in the back words that we couldn’t find in the book. I remember “hermeneutical” was one, and my friend Reuter wrote his own name into the list of missing words. Chump.

- If someone doesn’t want to play along, the preferred excuse is, “No, thanks: I’m more of an encyclopedia man, myself.”

Silly Games – Friendly or Furious? February 29, 2008

Before I lived in the city, the best people-watching I could ever find was at the airport during holiday season. You can assume a lot of probably mistaken things about folks making their way through airports. In the spirit of simplicity, my friend Steve and I narrowed it down to two categories: Friendly or Furious.

Step One: Get a pretzel. With some cheese.

Step Two: Sit down in some nonchalant place along a wall in a very wide hallway.

Step Three: Predict.

Silly Games – Rocks and Cup November 12, 2007

One of the games we returned to again and again at the Black Hills Playhouse was Rocks and Cup. Get a cup.

Have everyone grab ten rocks. The one who can sink the most wins. You’ll find yourselves mixing it up with new versions. Group Rock and Cup, where you all attempt to sink the highest number in a row. Or dropping rocks from the roof of a building. Distance, where you’re only allowed to drink your beer when you sink one.