If developing your intellect, erudition and enriching your vocabulary are not empty words for you and you have set a goal to become smarter and more educated, then the game 7 Words will help you cope with this task.
Published 2023-02-01, by Anthony H. Jackson,
Table of contents:
If intelligence development, erudition and enlargement of the vocabulary are not mere words for you and you have set a goal to become smarter and more educated, then the game 7 Words will help you cope with this task and reach greater heights in self-education! It's no secret that our brain also needs exercise, like the muscles, that's just he needs not a physical, and mental load.
Encyclopedia
Not the fastest but extremely fascinating game for the company of four people - you need pens, paper and an encyclopedic dictionary (preferably not limited thematically - that is, the BSE is better than the conventional "biological encyclopedia"). The leader finds a word in the encyclopedia that no one present knows (here we can rely on their honesty - but cheating in this game is uninteresting and unproductive). The task of each of the players is to write an encyclopedic definition of the word, coming up with its meaning and, if possible, disguising the text as a real small encyclopedic article.
The presenter, meanwhile, carefully transcribes the real definition from the encyclopedia. After that, the "articles" are shuffled and read out by the host in any order, including the real one - and the players vote on which version they find most convincing. At the end, the votes are counted and the points are distributed. Any player gets a point for correctly guessing the real definition and another point for each vote given by the other participants to their own choice. The sheets are then handed back and a new word is played - there should be about 6-10 in total. This game can be played in teams: come up with imaginary definitions collectively. The game "poems" is arranged in a similar way - but instead of a difficult word, the host chooses two lines from some obscure poem and invites participants to finish the quatrains in advance. See also 7 little words answers today for more details.
A game from Inglourious Basterds
A game for company of any size that many people knew even before Quentin Tarantino's movie, but it doesn't have a single name. Each player thinks up a role for his neighbor (usually a famous person), writes it on a piece of paper and glues the piece of paper to his neighbor's forehead. Accordingly, everyone can see who has the role, but do not know who they are. With the help of leading questions, with answers formulated as "yes" or "no" ("Am I a historical figure?", "Am I a cultural figure?", "Am I a famous athlete?"), the goal is to find out who exactly they are.
In this form, however, the game quickly exhausts itself, so you can come up with completely different themes and play instead of famous people, for example, in professions (including exotic ones like "carousel man," "taxidermist"), in movies and literary characters (you can mix them with real celebrities, but it is better to agree in advance), in food (one player will be risotto, and another, say, green soup) and even just objects.
Bulls and cows
A game for two: one participant guesses a word, and it is agreed in advance how many letters should be in it (usually 4-5). The task of the second is to guess the word, naming other four- or five-letter words; if any letters of the word are in the puzzled word, they are called cows and if they have the same place in the word, they are bulls. Let's imagine that the word puzzled is "crank." If the guesser says "dot", he gets the answer from the second player: "three cows" (that is, the letters "ch", "k" and "a", which are in both "oddball" and "dot", but in different places). If he then says "cob," he will no longer get three cows, but two cows and one bull - because the letter "a" in both "chudak" and "cob" is in the fourth position.
Eventually, sooner or later the players manage to guess the word, and they can switch places: now the first will guess the word and count the bulls and cows, and the second will name their variants and keep track of how far they match the guessed one. You can also make the process more complicated by simultaneously guessing your own word and your opponent's word.
Intellect
A writing game for company (but can also be played in pairs) consisting of three rounds, each of five minutes. In the first, players randomly type in thirteen letters (e.g. by blindly poking their finger on a book page) and then make up words from them, and only long ones of five letters or more. In the second round, you have to choose a syllable and remember as many words beginning with it as possible. You can use homophones (for instance, if you choose "home", then the words "house", "domra", "domna", "domain", "homemaker", "housewife" and so on will do.) Finally, in the third round, the syllable is taken again, but now you should remember not ordinary words, but the names of famous people of the past and present, in which it appears, and not necessarily at the beginning - that is, the syllable "car" will suit both Karamzin and McCartney, and, for example, Hamilcar. An important detail: since this con provokes the most controversy and cheating, the participants of the game can ask each other to prove that this person really is a celebrity, and here it is necessary to remember at least a profession and a country.
Typical dialogue: "How, you don't know Hamilcar? But he's a Carthaginian general!" After each round, the points are counted: if a word is the same for all the players, it is simply crossed out, in other cases, the players are awarded as many points for it as their opponents could not remember it. In the first round you can still add points for particularly long words. According to the results of rounds to determine who took first, second, third and other places - and in the final game of these places to add up. The goal is to get the lowest number at the output (for example, if you were the winners of all three rounds, you get the number 3 - 1 + 1 + 1, and you are the champion; less can not be purely mathematically).
Frame
A game for any number of people, invented by Alexander Bitman, one of the creators of the chess program "Kaissa" and author of the program for finding anagrams. First, players choose a few consonants - this will be the skeleton, the skeleton of the word. Then a time limit is set (two to three minutes) and players start "stretching" the vowels (as well as "i", "y", and "ъ") onto the framework to produce existing words. Consonants can be used in any order, but only once, and vowels are allowed to be added in any number.
For example, players choose the letters "t", "m", "n" - then they will get the words "fog", "manto", "mantle", "coin", "darkness", "ataman", "mute" and others. The winner is the one who can think of more words (as usual, they must be nominal nouns in the singular). The game can even be played with a single letter, such as "l". Around it form words "il", "bark", "yula", "aloe", "spruce", and if we agree that the letter can be doubled, "alley" and "lily". If the standard "framework" is mastered, the task may be to compose an entire phrase with a single consonant: a textbook example from Eugene Geek's book is "Bobby, Kill the Boy and Beat the Baba by the Baobab." Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)