Time's Up!

It's a social game that is quite fun to play. Preferably played with an even number of players. Also preferably played with at least 6 players.

You need 4 small pieces of paper for each player, a timer and a pen.

On each of his 4 bits of paper, each player writes the name of one famous person. It should be someone famous enough that most of the people present can recognise if described. It cannot be a person in the room.

Once everyone has done that, you shuffle the the papers together, face hidden and the first player of the first team starts:

He or she has 45 seconds to describe, verbally, as many persons as he can from the stack of papers, without telling their name. The other members have to guess who it is, but they have an unlimited number of guesses. You cannot skip a paper, so if you do not know the person on the paper you have to try to make your team-mates guess the identity phonetically. If the guessing players find the name, the one describing player follows up with the next paper. When the time is up, the first player of the other team continues with the last paper of the previous team. This continues until all papers have been guessed. The teams count their number of correct guesses and the team with the less guesses starts round two:

The papers are shuffled, then the first player of the team that is lagging in the score reads the top paper of the stack and tries to make his team guess the name by saying only one word. If the first answer his team-mates give is correct, they keep the paper, if it is wrong they put the paper at the bottom of the stack. The discribing player may skip any paper at any moment by putting it at the bottom of the library. This process is repeated until: a) the 45 seconds are up, b) the player has to describe the exact same paper again (he cycled through the stack to a paper he had skipped or to a paper his team-mates guess wrong the same turn) and c) there are no more papers in the stack. The teams then count the number of correct guesses they got and add those to the previous numbers. The team that is behind on the count starts the 3rd round:

The third round is the same with the second one, but the player has to mime everything instead of saying a word. At the end of the three rounds, the team with the most total correct guesses wins!

Chess Diving

Since chess boxing already exists, just a silly thought:

Chess diving: an underwater game of strategy and high lung capacity.

The basic idea is to play a competitive game of chess underwater, without access to any breathing apparatus. The game follows the standard chess rules as far as game pieces movement goes, the only difference is the time limit: 40 minutes for each player, yet in that time they might have to surface and breathe.

I take here a moment to note that I have deliberately not yet truly spoken about the current situation in Greece. I do not even know whether I will do so, but I will not hold back my stupid ideas from being published on the web, regardless of that.