Games to Play In Real Life
Physical, common-tech games to tickle your fancy.
Table of Contents
Jedi Force Battle
minimum 4 players
This simple game was born of a brief discussion between Bryan Mayer and myself at the First Annual Timberlane Middle School Game Jam. The theme was "May the Fourth Be With You".
Setup
Pick a location that has a lot of things around the room.
Divide into two teams, pick a Jedi Master for each team.
Have the two Jedi Masters meet apart from the rest of the team.
- Each Master picks a Target for the other to acquire.
- A good Target is easy to see and carry, but tricky to acquire. Maybe it's buried in a pile or among many similar items.
- Try assigning a task, like "get a cup full of water", "remove all the pillows from the couch", or "eat an unwrapped Twizzler".
You are ready to begin!
Play
- Once the game begins, the Jedi Masters cannot speak or leave their agreed upon spot.
- The rest of the Team play the role of their Jedi Master's Force Powers. They will be interpreting and acting out the will of their Jedi Master.
- Using elaborate Force gestures, each Jedi Master must move all obstacles out of the way and draw their Target object to them.
- The first Jedi Master to have their object in their hands wins!
Rules
- True Jedi Masters do not point or charade.
- The Force must never be used to cause harm.
Wordplay
Setup
Write down a word or phrase.
Vowels are our Heroes and the consonants (including y) are their Enemies.
Rules
- On the Heroes' Turn, each Hero can either:
- Attack an Enemy to the immediate left or right
- Sacrifice itself to capitalize another Hero
- Heroes can be played in any order.
- On the Enemies' Turn, from left to right:
- they each attack one adjacent Hero
- if more than one, attack on the side with fewer/weaker Heroes
- Each letter attacks once and take one hit to kill.
- Capital letters attack twice and become lowercase when hit.
- Ignore spaces between words.
- Heroes go first.
Some battles to try: Tutorial, tornado, sharknado, aardvark, explosion, defense, weakness, three aardvarks, Constantinople.
Two Player: One controls vowels, one controls consonants.
Asymmetric: At the start of the Enemies' round, the Boss capitalizes one of the Enemies.
Clarifying Examples: in the word "flea", the a and f are safe. In the name "Albert", the A can eliminate the l then the b.
Dice Tilt
in progress
Roll 3-5 dice onto a flat surface and align to 90-degree orientations.
Pick any of the dice and tip it onto any of its four vertical sides.
All the other dice must be tilted in the opposite direction.
Goal: get all the dice to say the same number.
Psychic War
At the start of a regular game of war, each player places a single card on the side, face-down.
After a war is completed, the losing player has a chance to guess the face-down their opponent set aside
Their opponent checks, if they're correct, they win the entire game.
#128chargame
In July 2013, I participated in a Twitter experiment started by Zach Gage: create a game design that fits into 128 characters and post it on Twitter. I kind of got carried away. Here are my entries.
🔗 Record a spoken phrase. Play it backwards. Record yourself imitating the back-play. Play THAT backwards. Closest/funniest wins.
🔗 Two teams. Shuffle cards, place random card on side. Spread out rest of cards. No other rules. Be 1st team to correctly guess.
🔗 Write 0 somewhere. Players can add 1 once a day. Spy subs the # of opponents. If caught, Spy wins if # of days played > number.
🔗 When holding a stick-shaped object, flip it 180 degrees, again, 360, again, 1.5x, again,... see how high you can get.
🔗 Go to the museum. One point for each picture of people taking pictures. Pictures of other players taking pictures count double.
🔗 Tweet/text all players "RUNNING". Add number of seconds until first "CAUGHT" reply to score. Highest score after a month wins.
🔗 ESCAPE!: If someone counts a picture off, on 3 whoever gets the farthest out of the picture wins.
🔗 Spread Lego's on the floor of a room. After memorizing, try to cross barefoot and blindfolded. MP: Farthest/fastest wins.
🔗 Key Player sits in the middle of a circle of other players. Players convince Key Player to finger-shoot them last.
🔗 Knights' Duel. Play a game of chess with only the two knights on each side.
🔗 Have a formal debate about who wins. Witnesses may be called, all stats/sources must be from http://randomwebsite.com.
🔗 Players choose a distinct glitter color, place a pinch somewhere around the house. Watch spread. Most recently seen is winning.
🔗 At a meeting, text back/forth with other player(s). Discipline = Elimination. Bonus points:loudest ringer, longest relevant txt.
🔗 [in a video game context] When you die, a tweet goes out that allows any other player to exhume your remains and pick up where you left off.
🔗 [in a video game context] A game where you literally need to stay up and vigilant all night with your friends.