More games

[prog]

Dragged by dougo and cthulhia to novalis & co.'s housewarming on Friday. Fun was had, la, la, cookies, games, and beer. Played two rounds of Telephone Pictionary, except this crowd (mostly strangers to me, I think largely MIT students) called it something different ("the paper game", maybe). I drew the Wizard of Oz, the Torah, an alcoholic female surgeon having a crisis of conscience, Genesis 1, Isaac Asimov, and an insult to birds. Both cthulhia and I were consistently complimented on how our drawings stood out from the violent stick figures. As usual, this was the closest thing I've done to cartooning since... the last time I played this.

My taking-things-too-seriously-as-usual notes on the game:
• There are basically two styles of play, and this is wholly the choice of the person writing the starting sentence.
•• It can be a well-known quotation, idiom, or adage. This is more likely to succeed in carrying through to the end, unchanged. (Some people get sad when this -- that is, nothing -- happens to their sentence, but I think it's an impressive show of group communication when it occurs.)
•• It can be anything else, in which case wide mutation is almost guaranteed.
• For best results, the starting sentence should have at least a chance of making it through to the end.
•• Making your starting sentence a line of ungrammatical pop-song lyrics that isn't yet baked into pop culture is dumb.
•• Making your starting sentence a joke about one of the players when not all the players know each other is also dumb. (That said, my drawing of the surgeon, which I am pretty proud of, came from one of these, so: whatever.)
• Some (most?) players tasked with drawing a sentence will try making a sort of pseudo-rebus from it, rather than drawing a comic or something else evocative. This is doomed to failure. I mean, do what you will, but you may as well draw a picture of a pretty pony or a birthday cake or something else you like, and it will be as successful in conveying the meaning as some hieroglyphs that you just made up.

Played Zendo, and also played Zendo the night before with some other people. Zendo is a great game. I love Zendo.

Saturday went to Freak House to play Karaoke Revolution 3. It has male/female duets now; very nice. Also features a short-song mode that helps deflect my complaint with the first KR game: when playing at a party, it often took way too long for your turn to come around again. So that's good. I'm still not very good at the game. But it was fun singing "What a Feeling" with jadelennox while dressed as a pirate and a Canadian robot.

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Finally found a copy of Katamari Damacy, at Best Buy for $20. You should be like me and only like weird good games that are anathema to generic teenage boys; they're always half-price or better. Short review: I like it. Longer review forthcoming, as part of GS-01.

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

Interesting observations on telephone pictionary. I agree that the rhebus method rarely works. I also agree with some of your fellow-players that its kind of boring when the sentence survives. Very funny to see the sentence *come back* after mutating, or mutating into another stable configuration, however. Other people I know call this game "fun" but I first learned it as telephone pictionary.

Have you ever played telephone oracle? Similar paper-and-pen game where the alternation is between question and answer. One answers the question, the next thinks of a question to which that could be the answer and so on. End on an answer and then read aloud the initial question and final answer as "thoughts from the oracle". Then follow the full chain. Often too funny for breathing.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Yeah, one of mine fared very well... it started "Hello sailor!", and morphed into a fairy tale about a prince who was so entranced by the huge... tracts of land of his beloved that he dashed across the country and then sailed over the sea. The thing was that this mutation survived through four people until the end! Brilliant.

I haven't played Oracle yet; it sounds fun. Cth tried to get a game of Oracle going (or at least mentioned it a few times) but nobody bit.

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

One of the nifty things about oracle is that being text only, it can be played on line. A friend has a service where one can play on IRC, which is the last time I played this game myself. It also is something I've pursuaded non-gaming people to partake in.

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

What does a Canadian robot look like?

[jadelennox]

Like this guy, only with a head-top that comes clean off when he talks, like South Park Canadians.

[cnoocy]

Also, he has something of a red/white/red color scheme.

[aspartaimee.livejournal.com]

you can't see it, but i am salivating.

if only he had the red jecket...