Here's the Thing

The blog has been out of commission for a week now as I've been in the process of moving. But now, amid the piles of boxes that are slowly coalescing into home, things have settled enough to try to get back to business as usual here.

I'll start with some very brief thoughts on a silly little party game I played on Labor Day -- The Game of Things...

(cue dramatic opening Game of Thrones music)

This is one of those "spark thought and conversation" sort of games, where a card each round provides a topic for the players ("things you enjoy but don't do often enough, "things you would find torturous," etc.). Everyone writes an answer, and then people try to guess who wrote what.

This would probably be a forgettable game, except for the novel element of how it's scored. Once all the answers have been submitted and the round's designated "reader" has read them all, players take turns one at a time trying to pair up one answer with the person who wrote it. If you guess right, you score a point, and that person is eliminated from guessing for the rest of the round. You continue around the circle until every answer has been paired up. Thus, the extra wrinkle is that you have incentive for your answer not to be guessed.

What ensued was hardly the best party game I've played, but it was a format into which we could inject a little bit of deduction and strategy. You want to write something that doesn't quite seem like the answer you'd actually give. Maybe something that sounds like someone else would have written it. Then can you find the clues that reveal one of your friends even when they were trying to obscure their normal way of thinking?

Even with the twist, the game is only going to be as good as your friends are witty, and fortunately I have a good group for that. We had a lot of laughs (including the biggest laugh I think we've ever had playing a party game -- tears streaming down faces in full "you had to be there" mode). Still, there are other games far more likely to make game night, even when we're all in a party game mood.

I'd give The Game of Things a B-. It's right about on that line of "would play if suggested, wouldn't suggest it myself."