All right, the Forehead Game isn’t a game in the strictest sense—it’s more like a shared group activity. A parlor game, perhaps. That doesn’t stop it from being a hell of a lot of fun. I was introduced to another such game/activity this weekend, and now I’m all aflutter.

Telephone Pictionary

Players: Strangely enough, an odd number is best. 7 is perfect; 5 or 9 works OK, and 6 or 8 is manageable.

Materials: A blank sheet of paper and a pen/pencil for each player.

Setup: Everyone writes their name at the bottom right of a sheet of paper. Then on the top, write a phrase or sentence. Song lyrics, sayings, quotes, or random thoughts are all fine.

Play: After writing the sentence, each player passes the paper clockwise. Upon receiving the paper, each player draws the phrase or sentence as best as possible.

When finished, that player folds the paper so the original sentence cannot be seen—only the drawing. The paper is then passed to the right again, and the next player has to interpret the drawing as a sentence. That player then folds the paper so the drawing cannot be seen—only the new sentence—and passes it again. Repeat passing the paper, writing a sentence or drawing, and folding until the paper comes back to its originator. (With an even number of people, skip the last drawing.) Unfold the paper and be amused at how your sentence changed as it was interpreted and re-interpreted by your fellow players.

Strategy: There is no way to win or lose, of course. I’ve seen three ways of picking sentences, all legitimate:

1. Choose a phrase that’s pretty easy and see whether or not it can survive. For instance, “Raining cats and dogs” made it through unscathed. “Stop in the name of love” did all right too.

2. Choose a phrase that you know will be very hard and see what fundamental truth you get about the universe. “I’m afflicted; you’re addicted” came back to me as “Smoking kills.” “Every little thing she does is magic” returned as “All people, big and small, near and far, love the Fourth of July!”

3. Choose an incredibly complicated phrase and watch the mayhem. “The knife-wielding gundam flew to attack the gun-wielding gundam” returned to its creator as “Just like a Sicilian, bringing a knife to a gunfight.” (After only 5 players!)

Animals come up pretty regularly. My experience is that cats, dogs, monkeys, and maybe horses can make it through unscathed. Anything else is going to get misinterpreted somewhere along the line.

It was also brought to my attention that the game is also known as “Cat Eat Poop,” almost certainly because that phrase came up during someone’s session.

With a full month of posts behind me, I feel comfortable laying out the schedule I intend to keep. This is: Full-length articles every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, with shorter articles on the days between when I have the inspiration.

The second part of the computer/board game series is on indefinite hiatus until my ennui is dispelled.

I played Sequence, which is new (to me) last night. It’s a mainstream commercial board game that you can get at Target. The board is made up of a large (10×10) grid of playing cards, which are laid out in a semi-regular manner. (The card images are shrunk, so the size is reasonable.) There are no jacks, though, and the corners are wild. The game ships with an ordinary double deck of playing cards. On your turn, you play a card from your hand (hand size depends on the number of players), place a token on a corresponding space on the board, and draw a replacement card. The idea is to make a run of 5 markers in a row (the Sequence from which the game derives its name).

The game is fun and exciting enough, although it’s kind of light on strategy because you don’t have many options—only one card changes every turn—and it’s very unlikely that the order you play your cards in will actually matter. To me, a bigger turnoff was the jacks. Jacks are wild; one-eyed jacks allow you to remove any enemy marker, while two-eyed jacks allow you to place a marker on any space. Both, of course, are devastatingly powerful. The two-eyed jacks make finishing a sequence trivial when you might ordinarily have to wait a long time for the card you need; the one-eyed jacks let you ruin your opponent’s formations, and the damage is almost impossible to repair, because the card that allowed the marker to be played in the first place is gone!

The jacks are so powerful that it’s almost impossible the player who gets the most not to win the game. It’s infuriating to draw no jacks while your opponent gets a bunch and gets to do whatever s/he wants, and winning because you drew a couple at the right time isn’t very satisfying either. The huge arbitrary element introduced by these is a big turnoff for me, which is why I’ll be advocating for the following house rules the next time I play:

• All jacks can be used either to play or remove a marker, but only for their own suit.
• You can’t use a jack to finish a Sequence.

Hopefully, these rules will make the use of jacks more interesting, instead of just “save them until you have enough to win.”

(There’s also a team game, which I’d like to try. Teams share markers but aren’t allowed table talk. I assume this is to keep the game moving, but it seems strange.)

My gaming group got together and played Insinuation the other night.

The good: It’s a lot of fun, more fun than I remember Clue being. The game doesn’t suffer at all from the loss of the board. The little notepads they ship with the Clue are really inadequate for the serious note-taking that will really help you out. Blank paper and pens worked quite well.

The bad: The fun of the game didn’t suffer from the lack of a theme. However, the fact that the three categories of cards were completely indistinguishable caused havoc, to the point of making the game nearly unplayable. Exchanges of the form “Did you say the two of spades, three of hearts, and two of diamonds?” / “No, I asked for the three of spades, two of diamonds, three of hearts” were rampant. One misunderstanding of a request caused grave confusion (when a player realized several turns later that he did, in fact, have one of the cards he had been asked for) and I have a suspicion that another mishearing (or was it misspeaking?) cost another player the game on a wrong guess.

Clue, of course, doesn’t suffer from this problem at all. It’s impossible to mistake “Rope and Ballroom” for “Wrench and Library.”

The solution: Well, we obviously needed a theme. Late-night banter brought us to apocalyptic conspiracies, and the categories are now:

· Secret Societies (the NSA, the Illuminati, the Templars)

· Ancient Evils they’re trying to summon (Lucifer, Cthulu, Dracula)

· Locations (Atlantis, the Pyramids, Stonehenge)

“Fuleng,” as he’s calling himself in the comments, used Illustrator and the finest images Google Image Search could provide to print up some cards (so no, unfortunately, I can’t share them.) They’re hilarious and we’re going to try it again as soon as possible.

The only downsides are that you can’t just use an ordinary deck of playing cards, and that preprinted note sheets are again required. (Although everyone can remember the numbers 2-7, it’s necessary to have a cheat sheet so you’ll know which secret society you haven’t eliminated.) These, of course, are created with no problem.

The only other refinement I’m planning is to adjust the number of cards in the “long suit” before the game starts so that every player has the same number of cards to start.

We’re also considering a rule that if a player loses, his cards are dealt out to the other players (so he doesn’t have to sit around for the rest of the game). This strikes me as dubiously balanced, so we’ll see if it’s still necessary in the newly-themed variant.

Its name is Crackpot Theory, by the way.

No tremendously deep thoughts today. I have a cold and another article I want to write more, so all you get is this listing of a few more turnoffs.

Too Expensive: I used to play Magic: the Gathering and Legend of the Five Rings. Both are good games, but staying current in these games can get very expensive, and playing only with older cards leaves you playing the same decks with just a few people. Only collectible games really suffer from this turnoff; other board games generally provide one of the best dollars/hour ratios of any form of entertainment.

Too Aggressive: Some people don’t like behaving aggressively in a game. My ex and some of her friends liked to play Settlers of Catan and “drown the Robber,” moving him to an ocean square instead of blocking off a rival’s resources. They didn’t appreciate it when ordinary Catan players engaged in the ordinary, aggressive tactic of locking an important hex. Settlers of Catan could be adapted to their style, but some games are totally hopeless; in Hearts, for example, dumping your points on others is inevitable.

Huge Learning Curve: Bridge is the worst offender I know of in this regard. Even without most conventions, there are dozens of subtle intricacies to the bidding and play. To make matters worse, it’s a partnership game, so it’s not always OK to just sit down and lose your first 50 games (like in Chess or Go).

Too Arbitrary: If all of your well-laid plans can be rendered meaningless with a small turn of bad fortune, too many such incidents can turn you off to a game. Finding examples of this turnoff was harder than I thought. Most games allow you to at least manage the risk, which greatly reduces the power of this turnoff. The worst offender I can think of is the TV show Wheel of Fortune with its BANKRUPT hazard. In the realm of board games, the otherwise-excellent Settlers of Catan can be very frustrating when a 9-10 long string of bad rolls sets you back a dozen resources. Robo Rally isn’t all that arbitrary, but the amount of unpredictability introduced in a game that’s otherwise all about careful planning grates on me.

The second half of the computer/board game articles is temporarily postponed. That article is about the bad part of computer/board game crossovers, so this miniseries should be a relevant interlude anyway. (It wasn’t going to be a miniseries at first, but it ended up spilling way over a reasonable length for a single article, so I’m splitting it up.)

Just as games have payoffs, the moments that you enjoy and come back for, they also can have turnoffs, moments (or stretches) that you dislike, that would make you not want to play that game again. Like payoffs, what constitutes a turnoff—or how severe it is—is different for different people. I’ll plow through some that come to mind, to get us all thinking about the subject; when I talk about individual games later, then, I can talk about their turnoffs, comparing and contrasting them to others.

Please note that I enjoy many of the games I’m about to mention—either I don’t care about the turnoffs, they don’t apply to me, or they don’t outweigh the payoffs. Everybody has a few games they dislike, though; I’m trying to grasp the reasons why my family and friends dislike the games they do.

Not Enough Involvement: The feeling that I’m just watching a game instead of playing it. Monopoly is pretty bad in this regard. For all the rolling I do, I get to make precious few decisions. If I just wanted to watch, I’d watch the TV. This is also what turns me off of Rummy-type card games like Gin or 500 Rum; you just sit around throwing off useless cards until sets land on top of you, then you score some points.

Takes Too Long: This problem is worse if the game tends to have too few opportunities to make decisions, or tends to be a foregone conclusion partway into the game; but a game that takes longer than my attention span lasts can be a drag, even if it might otherwise be interesting all the way through. People have tried to get me to play Axis and Allies, but the game doesn’t seem to have enough juicy bits to make it worth the four-hour investment. Large multiplayer games suffer the worst from this turnoff. Diplomacy, Civilization, and the non-computerized Titan are some of the games I won’t play in part because they just take too long. By contrast, Iron Dragon, Chess, and Bridge can also all take a while, but are interesting enough the whole way through to be worth it. Chess is especially good because if the game stops being interesting because one player has clearly won, the other usually resigns.

Have To Think Too Much: This is somewhat the opposite of the “Not Enough Involvement” turnoff. Chess and Go take quite a while to play, and thinking a whole game through can leave you exhausted at the end. Furthermore, the more you think and plan during the game, the more of a personal failure it can seem like if you lose. Like rejection in a relationship, it’s easy to see how fear of this failure can turn you off of a game.

This is the first of a two-part series, discussing computer/board game crossovers. This version will cover the highlights. Next article covers the not-so-highlights.

The bane of every Bridge player’s existence is the cold, hateful fact that you need exactly four people to play. Getting exactly four when you want them requires both planning and luck. If you want to play more often than you can manage to get four people together at the same time—or if you want to play just a couple of hands—playing on the Internet is the way to go. I can’t recommend Yahoo Bridge, which is populated by what might generously be called “complete morons.” Bridge Base Online is the way to go; people there know and play American conventions, even if they don’t speak much English.

Chess isn’t usually quite as hard to get people together for, but playing against the same person, or the same handful of people, over and over can get tiring. There are a bunch of free chess servers online (enough that I don’t need to recommend any; Google will lead the way) and plenty of good players for whatever kind of game you want to play at whatever time. I hear even Death logs on from time to time; you’ll know him because he will want to know HOW THE LITTLE HORSE-SHAPED ONES MOVE.

Several years ago I was introduced to the board game Titan. Invented back in the time when saber-toothed tigers and mainframes roamed the earth, Titan featured Byzantine rules for moving your little stacks of creatures around the board and having them recruit additional followers. Your movement options differed based on whether you were starting on a square or just passing through, and the bookkeeping was downright incredible. When one stack attacked another, the players involved broke into a mini-game-combat that could last for 20 minutes. Everyone else got to sit and watch. To make matters even worse, the game required at least 3 people to be any good and players lost by being eliminated, which meant that one or more players would be sitting out for a third or more of what might be a six-hour-long game. Hope there’s something good on TV…

Eons later, Java was invented and some brave soul ported the game to Java, and even managed to put a decent AI onto it. To my great surprise, I found that the game was actually fun with a computer around to handle the massively complicated rules. Deciding how to move your stacks around is easy (the computer tells you where you can move and what you can recruit) and combat usually takes under a minute. Even beating up the AIs is exciting. The Java port, which is free, is called Colossus.

Iron Dragon, a railroad game in the Empire Builder series, benefits similarly from a computer to handle the bookkeeping busywork. In particular, the Undo button is like magic for helping players get through their turns quickly. It also lets you or you and your friend play in the highly-likely scenario that you can’t dig up the 3-6 players and 2-4 hours needed for a good game in person. Unfortunately, this one isn’t free, but if you like the game it’s probably worth getting.

Here are the rules for a game that I’ll dub Insinuation. It’s a lot like Clue. I’ve removed the lousy board-and-pawns element and stripped the theme away. Is the game still good without it? I’m not sure, actually. In the not-too-distant future I’ll talk about the importance of theme.

Equipment: From an ordinary deck of cards, use the 2-10 of spades, the 2-7 of hearts, and 2-7 of clubs. Each player will almost certainly need pen and paper.

Setup: Sort the cards by suit and shuffle each suit separately. Remove one card of each suit and set these three “mystery cards” aside. Then shuffle all remaining cards together and deal an equal number of them (or as close as possible) to each player.

Goal: The object of the game is to be the first player to deduce the identity of the mystery cards.

Play: Play proceeds counterclockwise. The first player who got one less card than the others goes first (choose randomly if they split evenly).

On each player’s turn, that player names one card from each of the three suits. The player on his left, if able, must secretly show the active player one of the named cards. (If that player has more than one, it is his choice which to show.) If that player has no such card, the next player to the left must reveal one if possible, and so on.

It is legal and often useful to name a card you hold in your own hand. Taking notes is encouraged and important.

Ending the Game: If you think you know the identity of the mystery cards, instead of taking an ordinary turn, you declare “I am solving the mystery,” and identify the three cards. Then you examine them. If you are right, you reveal them and win the game. If you are wrong, you state that you were incorrect. You lose the game and no longer take turns, but keep playing to show your cards to the other players on their turns.

You might be surprised to learn that you can’t copyright the rules to a game. You can copyright the text of the rules, you can copyright the artwork, and you can trademark the name of the game. But you can’t copyright the rules themselves. That’s why tomorrow, I’m going to share with you a game that has a striking similarity to Clue, played with an ordinary deck of playing cards.

You couldn’t get away with Clue today.

The heart of the game is actually very good. For the two people Out There who haven’t played, there are three types of cards: Weapons, Rooms, and People. One of each is set aside at random. The others are distributed among the players. The object is to deduce which three are missing. You do this by “suggesting” a weapon, room, and person, and the first person to your left who is able must show that you are wrong by showing you a card.

Anyway, in this heart, there are a lot of payoffs for a lot of people. It’s an exercise in deduction, and everyone gets to feel smart as they eliminate the impossible choices and gradually cross clues off their sheet. Kids can play, but for the observant and quick-thinking, there’s a lot of opportunity for skill. For example, if Alice suggests Mr. Green/Rope/Ballroom, and I’m holding Ballroom and Bob showed me Rope a while ago, but Chris is the one who proves Alice wrong, I can eliminate Mr. Green. Keeping track of who knows what and who’s making what suggestions for what reasons allows the game to be played on pretty interesting levels.

But there’s a fly in the ointment. Evidently, at the time it was produced, to have a board game, you had to have a board. The rooms are laid out on a board with little squares separating them. To get from one room to another, you have to roll a die and on your turn, you can move only that number of squares. You can only make suggestions that deal with the room you’re in. So if you need to ask about a room, it can take you a bunch of turns to get there; and if you keep rolling badly, you’re just out of luck.

To make matters even worse, when you make a suggestion involving a particular person, you grab their token from wherever it is and put it in the room with you. Evidently being idly suspected of murder makes you hurry. Tough luck if they were somewhere they wanted to be. Whether the asker is acting aggressively or just needs to use you as a convenient person to ask about, you might never get to get to the rooms you need to ask about, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.

And did I mention that all the die-rolling and moving of pawns slows down the game? It takes 45 minutes or an hour, which isn’t all that bad, but you could easily get two or three games in the same amount of time without the manipulation of pieces, wasting times in rooms you don’t want to be in, and cleanup afterwards.

In conclusion, Clue would be a pretty darn good, fast-playing, eight-dollar board game that you could play with players of all ages, if they would just lose the damn board. My gaming group doesn’t own the game, but my family does. Next time I meet up with my folks I’ll suggest this as a house rule and see how it goes.