One of the my favorite parlor games just got more fun.
In the version I learned years ago, you write names of famous people on scraps of paper and throw them in a hat. You break into teams. 1 person from each team gets 90 seconds to convey to his teammates who the celebrities are without using their names. If the name is “Chris Rock,” you say “this is a famous African-American comedian, he recently hosted the Oscars which was controversial…” and people guess Chris Rock. And then you draw “Phil Mickelson,” who apparently is one of the most famous golfers of all time but I don’t know anything about golf, so I can’t say “this is a white famous golfer.” So I say, his first name is the same as my uncle who recently died and his last name kind of rhymes with my last name except it sounds Swedish and someone says “Phil Nicholson” and then someone else who has heard of Phil Mickelson says “Phil Mickelson.” Like that.
But now it turns out there’s an “Advanced Edition.” And the quotes of course are because they parlor games don’t come in a box (yet), they are just fun games that people make up and play. Which is a lot of what I like about them.
In “the Advanced Edition” of “Celebrity” or “the Name Game” — you do a second round where you act each name out using no words (and people can guess partly because they know what the universe of names is). And then in the 3rd round, you just do 1 word for each person and they guess it.
Now if this blog had any readers, someone would write in and say, “hey you have the second and third rounds reversed.” And indeed, my friend Sunny told me it the opposite way and my son Nick told me it was more fun to do charades first and 1 word clue second.
When I played it with my old college friends we added a fourth round where you just share all the names telepathically. Actually, we didn’t play that round, but we talked about it.