A silly fun game to play rapidly with your friends and loved ones in 2023.
I thought this would be a fun thing to be my first non-fiction post in 2023 — my boyfriend and I over the Christmas season were, as a lot of people were, playing Heads Up! and also doing the Who am I? stickers out of Christmas crackers.
The premise of Heads Up! is that you hold your phone up to your forehead facing the room of other plays and, without saying what the person or thing is, they have to give you clues as to what it is. Once you get it, you tip your head forward and reveal the next clue, but because the game is played on a timer, you want to be going as fast as possible and skipping the ones you can’t get.
Who am I? is a way more basic premise — you stick a post-it note or a sticker to someone’s head, and they ask questions (especially yes or no questions) to determine who they are.
What we wanted was to play something that would be as fun as these but that we would be able to generate based on our own interests, and since we started last week, we’ve played a lot together but also with other friends, and it’s great.
I’m gonna go over some tips and what we did for working out our categories after I go through the initial set-up and play instructions. This game is particularly great for sharing special interests with each other, whether this is an ice-breaker in a room of people with hyperfixations and special interests and beloved obsessions, or whether it’s people you know and love where you have a shared knowledge of each other’s area of study.
What You Need:
- some paper
- a writing implement
- some scissors or some other way to cut the paper up into pieces
- a bowl or other container
The Set-Up:
- Each person gets a piece of paper and something to write with. Decide on a theme or categories, and have each person write out, without showing the other players, 30 or so entries to the pot.
- Separate out the entries so that each one is on a singular piece of paper, either by cutting them out or by tearing them.
- Fold each piece of paper and drop them in the bowl.
How to Play:
First, players set a timer for two minutes.
Taking the bowl in hand, the first player grabs a piece of paper, keeping it out of other people’s sight, and describes what’s written on it to the other players as quickly as they can. They are not allowed to say the name of the thing of person, and can’t use words on it either — for example, if you’re describing a pufferfish, you can’t use the word fish when describing it.
Once another player guesses what’s on the paper, the describer passes them the piece of paper and jumps to describing the next one.
If time is running out and people aren’t guessing what’s on the piece of paper, the describer can pass and set it aside; ditto, if the describer opens the piece of paper and doesn’t know what it is or how to describe it, they can put it in the pass pile.
At the end of each round, you can go through whatever was passed on, discuss what it was, and then put it back into the bowl.
Because this is a game that’s centred around different people’s interests, you end up with a huge mix of topics in the bowl — just playing with three people, I was picking up a bunch of English historical figures, linguists, philosophers, chemists, and physicists, despite none of those being my areas of expertise.
To keep score, just hand whoever’s successfully guessed the entry the piece of paper and let them have the ones they’ve guessed in a pile in front of them after you go however many rounds.
Playing with two people, you’re obviously passing back and forth between each other, but with more than that, you can pass the bowl around the circle for each go. Either play until you’re out of entries in the bowl or decide a certain number of rounds and play to that number.
We haven’t really been keeping score while we’ve played, because it’s just been fun to go fast with infodumping and doing the fastest pace of communication we can manage — once you play a few times, you find that coming up with new entries comes easier and faster, and also that you’ll come up with shorthand where you go through some tickets super quickly because all you’ll need is three words and you’re there.
We’re super excited about regularly adding new entries, especially as we go through new interests and hobbies, learn more about our areas of expertise and focus, and just have new experiences, engage with new media, and so on!
Setting Categories
We started our game with five categories, both coming up with ten entries for each one so we started out with 100 entries in the pot:
- Celebrities
- Historical Figures
- Fictional Characters
- Animals
And our fifth category was a wildcard category where we either added further entries for any of the above, or we came up with further ones from our respective areas of interest and study.
Depending on what you’re into, you could honestly make your whole game about your shared area of interest and/or study — if you’re into Marvel comics and/or the MCU, you could have hundreds and hundreds of entries that were just characters, places, powers and mutations, historical events within the Marvel universe, organisations, etc.
Natural history is a big interest of mine, especially marine biology and entomology, so we have a bunch of animals in place, and other than that there are several literary figures, historical pirates and a few pirate-related things (like the Jolly Roger, Flint’s Walrus, Treasure Island, etc), Greek mythology and philosophy, some concierge things, etc.
My boyfriend, on the other hand, is really into British constitutional history, chemistry, and astronomy, so there are the names of various royals and figures of note, chemical elements, some names of specific phenomena (like the Doppler effect), and the names of some of the planets, which luckily for me are also the names of Roman gods and goddesses.
We realised on our initial round that we both wrote in Marie Skłodowska-Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist, and that we both wrote her Polish name as well as her French name, because her Polish identity was important to her and it’s shitty that it’s often erased when we talk about her in pop culture.
On the other hand, I picked out Venus and went, “uhhh, she’s the Roman equivalent of Aphrodite, the wife of Mars, she’s a goddess of love,” and he went, “Ugh, I knew you’d do this, it’s not like Venus is the second planet from the Sun or anything,” and it was a laugh!
Playing with other friends, we added in a bunch of boardgame stuff, some linguists, several philosophical concepts, and so on; as we’ve played on, we’ve added a bunch of locations (whether that’s countries and cities, landmarks and monuments, etc), some favourite food and dishes, holidays, etc.
I would very much say that some of the biggest fun of this game is getting as nerdy as you can with it and really leaning into your specialist areas of study and/or your obsessions and favourite topics, especially because you learn so much about your friends’ and loved ones’ favourite topics.
Playing Online
I know that a lot of people are gonna read this and will want a way to play with friends online on Discord or whatever — the obvious solution other than each having your own bowls might be to have a list on Discord and then to copy and paste it into a spin the wheel random generator.
If you want something a little cleaner, you could use the RandBetween function on a shared Google Sheet.
I used the RandBetween function a little while ago for the purposes of Little Man Generation (as in, silly little characters who are a Little Man with a Problem), if you want to see it in action — you could very easily split into columns labelled with each person’s name and/or particular categories on a shared sheet and then share the generator too!
Hope this seems like fun and might be useful either as an icebreaker or to play with regular friends, enjoy!
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