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Guest
Guest
One of the things I miss about doing group trips is playing camp games. Family trips are still essentially a marathon of game nights.
And sometimes game days. Windbound, carving golf clubs from driftwood and sculpting a miniature golf course made for a most enjoyable couple of days. The course evolved over time, and fashioning the windmill on the 7[SUP]th[/SUP] was tricky.
Physical games:
All terrain bocci. Maybe the best backwoods game ever. We use 4 old wood croquet balls and a golf ball. Teams of two, winner of the last point gets to roll the golf ball (object target ball) out some tricky distance. The closest croquet balls score points.
Don’t play with DougD; he wants to overhand the golf ball 100 yards away, and after trying to hurl a croquet ball that far all afternoon your shoulder will in no shape for paddling the next day.
One of the best parts of AT Bocci is the inevitable “color commentary” among the participants. Think demented golf announcers with no sense of decorum. Rolling the golf ball into a pile of pony crap at Assateague is a time honored tradition.
Night horseshoes. More of a well-fueled Gentleman’s Trip late night game, but equally fun in the backyard at home. The contest is always visually awesome. Cyalume/glow sticks rubber banded to the stakes and shoes, with all other illumination vetbotten. It is admittedly errant-throw dangerous unless played with rubber shoes, but the lighted shoe flight and landing is remarkably entertaining.
I’ll leave the Gent trip remarks to your imagination. Try it.
Word games:
Seated around the campfire word games. There are dozens, from 20-questions to the kid classic “I’m going camping and I’m bringing. . . .” which seems to stump even smarter people playing for the first time.
Far and away my favorite sit-around-the campfire word game is Botticelli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botticelli_(game)
That game sounds far more complicated than it actually is. Botticelli has only four simple rules:
1)One person, the questionee, thinks of a well known/famous person and gives the first letter of their last name. Let’s say “C”.
2)The group asks “indirect” questions about famous people (or, increasingly, lesser famous people) whose last name starts with the same letter. “Is this one of the discoverers of the double helix?”
3)The questionee on the hot seat can come up with “Crick” or answer a direct question from the group.
4) Direct yes/no question from the group. “Is this person living?”, “Is this person male?”, “American?”. “Sports figure?”, Etc.
Indirect questions are not limited to the established criteria of male/living/American/sports figure or whatever has been elicited. My questionee chance of dredging up Miley Cyrus as a “C” answer to “Is this a pop star from Hannah Montana” is nil without the help of Goggle.
As the game progresses the group has direct-question elicited “Male, living, US, sports figure, black, individual sports, boxing”. . . . . with a “C”
Askers who believe they have ferreted out the identity then ask a pointed indirect question “Is this a living, male, US boxer?”
Questionee is free to answer with the obscure “No it is not Andrew Coleman”, which fits the too-simple phrasing of the question posed. Phrasing the specificity, and obscurity, of questions asked weighs heavily in this game and is a large part of the stumping fun.
After scoring the right to ask again with another stumping indirect “Is this a living, male, African-American boxer who won a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics?”
“No this is not Eddie Crook” still works. dang, the ‘60’s Olympics had two American gold medalist C’s.
Or, giving up, “Yes, this is Cassius Clay”. Game over and winning asker becomes the questionee on the hot seat. Gawd I hope they didn’t pick someone from pop culture.
Botticelli works because everyone has some area of trivia expertise, history, literature, sports, pop culture, comic book super heroes, 18[SUP]th[/SUP] century French poets (Memaquay no doubt), and everyone gets to throw increasingly obscure questions at the questionee, eventually amass a body of biographical evidence. Plus formulating the specificity of direct and indirect questions can be comical as hell.
Best word game ever. I still insist that Roger Tory Peterson is famous enough to qualify as a “P”.
And sometimes game days. Windbound, carving golf clubs from driftwood and sculpting a miniature golf course made for a most enjoyable couple of days. The course evolved over time, and fashioning the windmill on the 7[SUP]th[/SUP] was tricky.
Physical games:
All terrain bocci. Maybe the best backwoods game ever. We use 4 old wood croquet balls and a golf ball. Teams of two, winner of the last point gets to roll the golf ball (object target ball) out some tricky distance. The closest croquet balls score points.
Don’t play with DougD; he wants to overhand the golf ball 100 yards away, and after trying to hurl a croquet ball that far all afternoon your shoulder will in no shape for paddling the next day.
One of the best parts of AT Bocci is the inevitable “color commentary” among the participants. Think demented golf announcers with no sense of decorum. Rolling the golf ball into a pile of pony crap at Assateague is a time honored tradition.
Night horseshoes. More of a well-fueled Gentleman’s Trip late night game, but equally fun in the backyard at home. The contest is always visually awesome. Cyalume/glow sticks rubber banded to the stakes and shoes, with all other illumination vetbotten. It is admittedly errant-throw dangerous unless played with rubber shoes, but the lighted shoe flight and landing is remarkably entertaining.
I’ll leave the Gent trip remarks to your imagination. Try it.
Word games:
Seated around the campfire word games. There are dozens, from 20-questions to the kid classic “I’m going camping and I’m bringing. . . .” which seems to stump even smarter people playing for the first time.
Far and away my favorite sit-around-the campfire word game is Botticelli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botticelli_(game)
That game sounds far more complicated than it actually is. Botticelli has only four simple rules:
1)One person, the questionee, thinks of a well known/famous person and gives the first letter of their last name. Let’s say “C”.
2)The group asks “indirect” questions about famous people (or, increasingly, lesser famous people) whose last name starts with the same letter. “Is this one of the discoverers of the double helix?”
3)The questionee on the hot seat can come up with “Crick” or answer a direct question from the group.
4) Direct yes/no question from the group. “Is this person living?”, “Is this person male?”, “American?”. “Sports figure?”, Etc.
Indirect questions are not limited to the established criteria of male/living/American/sports figure or whatever has been elicited. My questionee chance of dredging up Miley Cyrus as a “C” answer to “Is this a pop star from Hannah Montana” is nil without the help of Goggle.
As the game progresses the group has direct-question elicited “Male, living, US, sports figure, black, individual sports, boxing”. . . . . with a “C”
Askers who believe they have ferreted out the identity then ask a pointed indirect question “Is this a living, male, US boxer?”
Questionee is free to answer with the obscure “No it is not Andrew Coleman”, which fits the too-simple phrasing of the question posed. Phrasing the specificity, and obscurity, of questions asked weighs heavily in this game and is a large part of the stumping fun.
After scoring the right to ask again with another stumping indirect “Is this a living, male, African-American boxer who won a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics?”
“No this is not Eddie Crook” still works. dang, the ‘60’s Olympics had two American gold medalist C’s.
Or, giving up, “Yes, this is Cassius Clay”. Game over and winning asker becomes the questionee on the hot seat. Gawd I hope they didn’t pick someone from pop culture.
Botticelli works because everyone has some area of trivia expertise, history, literature, sports, pop culture, comic book super heroes, 18[SUP]th[/SUP] century French poets (Memaquay no doubt), and everyone gets to throw increasingly obscure questions at the questionee, eventually amass a body of biographical evidence. Plus formulating the specificity of direct and indirect questions can be comical as hell.
Best word game ever. I still insist that Roger Tory Peterson is famous enough to qualify as a “P”.
