Games to Play In Real Life
Physical, common-tech games to tickle your fancy.
Table of Contents
👇 Wordplay (2020) 👇 Dice Tilt (2019) 👇 Jedi Force Battle (2018) 👇 Psychic War (2018) 👇 #128chargame (2013)
Wordplay
Setup
Write down a word or phrase.
Vowels are our Heroes and the consonants (including y) are their Enemies.
Rules
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.
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.
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.
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.
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