Couch Games

One of my all time favorite activities is getting together for socials with the great group of friends I have. Everyone has a few drinks, eats snacky type food, and the tolerance for stupidity is relaxed somewhat. I am made for the social activity. I love laughing with people, and making people laugh. I love Mark's one for one challenges, (although I'm sure this game was invented by Joylaine) and other games involving pain. I do however, truly hope that I am never considered an active participant in Mark and Chris's friggen sacking game, which should never be considered a game at all but an act of war. Horsing around aside, I love the group games we play, these are the games I like to call "couch games" .

The first couch game that comes to mind is "Things..". This is an ingenious little game which makes for a good time guaranteed. It's a very simple recipe, yet so devilishly delicious. One person reads from a card with a "thing" idea such as "Things which would make an opera more exciting", then using little papers the room writes down a "thing" that would make operas more exciting, all the papers then get placed in a hat, the reader then reads all the responses twice, followed by guesses of participants who wrote which Thing. This is one of the only games where winning doesn't matter. I have laughed myself to tears in this game, and think missy had contractions while we played once, man was that funny. You will find current themes in this game keep coming up based on tipping the laughter scale. This is the ingenious part of this game, what is funny in one situation is funnier in another. There's Gord's famous "thing", a vending machine, those of you playing know what I'm talking about. This special vending machine which performs a very special task has shown up everywhere, and it's over two years old! "Things.." good game.

The "Name Game" is a group get-to-know each other mixed in with some memory. Everyone writes a name of a famous person and places it in a hat. Then a reader reads them all out loud and it becomes a who-wrote-what game after this, but the names are never repeated. There's a few things I don't like about this game. It's hard to be creative, and the winner is the one who usually chooses the most forgettable name. It is quite sanitary though, it stays at a G rating for most of the time. Until of course Ray mixes it up a little and throws in the names "Heywood Jablowme" or "Dick Izinya" There are only a few times I laughed myself to a near stroke, that was one of them, mostly because my mom was reading them at the time, "Now.. vat de? Haary Paritesties? Now.. who is dat?" Crazy.

There's this other couch game we played once at Darren and Julie's introduced by Mark. I can't remember the name of the game but what I do remember is a whole lot of rules, and a crap load of laughter. We had to visually draw a pop culture slogan, pass it to the person beside you who would translate the picture into words, and then the next person would draw that slogan and so on.. very difficult for me cause I couldn't draw if my life depended on it. Trying drawing "Where Fresh is the Taste".. What made this game filled with aneurism inducing hilarity were Darren's renditions of the slogans. Holy crap, I actually couldn't look at his drawings at one point fearing that I would literally die from laughter. This is a definite do again.

Missy introduced another great couch game to us once called "Mafia". I've only played this game once, but from what I remember I can't wait to play again. It involves a story teller, and participants lying and acting, all without having to get yer butt out of the seat. I think I'm going to host a Mafia night where we do nothing else but play Mafia and of course drink wine and eat cheese. Who's in?