Games to Play In Real Life

Physical, common-tech games to tickle your fancy.

Wordplay (2020)

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 (2019)

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 (2018)

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

  1. Pick a location that has a lot of things around the room.

  2. Divide into two teams, pick a Jedi Master for each team.

  3. Have the two Jedi Masters meet apart from the rest of the team.

    1. Each Master picks a Target for the other to acquire.
    2. 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.
    3. Try assigning a task, like "get a cup full of water", "remove all the pillows from the couch", or "eat an unwrapped Twizzler".
  4. You are ready to begin!

Play

Rules

Psychic War (2018)

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 (2013)

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.

Update: 2025-08-19 - I don't have Twitter any more.

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