Game night!

Have you ever played Celebrity? I like to pretend that it was created by my friends at NU, but apparently that isn't so. In any event, a few of my college friends got together last night for a Game Night, where we enjoyed a rocking game of Celebrity.

Here's how WE play. First, everyone is given a few slips of paper- we went with 6 pieces each, but you can do more or less, depending on how many people are playing and how long you want the game to last. Each person takes the time to right a person's name on each slip of paper before returning it to the bowl. But the term "person" doesn't limit you to real people- you can also include characters names, etc. If you're like my friends and I, this is one of the more difficult parts of the game. You want to include really challenging names- especially ones that will make people say "wow- that was a good one".

Once everyone has put their names in the bowl, it's time to pick teams. You can play with just two teams, or more... just so long as each team has the same amount of people. After team names are created (for scoring purposes), it's time to begin the first round. I'm going to rely on Wikipedia for the next instructions:

One team is chosen to go first, and that team selects a player to give clues to the rest of his or her team. Play begins when the clue-giver picks a name out of the bowl- from that moment, he or she has 45 seconds to get his/her team to guess as many names as possible before time runs out.
In the first round, the clue-giver can say anything he or she wants as long as it is not any part of the celebrity's name or a direct reference to the name.
When the team guesses the celebrity name correctly, the clue-giver draws another name from the bowl and continues until time is up or there are no more names in the bowl.
When time is up, the current clue is reinserted into the bowl, since it hasn't been guessed. The team is awarded a point for every name they guessed correctly. The next team then picks a clue-giver and play continues until there are no more names in the bowl. Teams must rotate the clue-giver each round until every member of the team has been given a chance.

I hope this isn't too confusing, because there's MORE! After all the names have been guessed in the first round, the slips of paper are all put BACK in the bowl for round two. This round works the same way, except the clue-giver is now limited to ONLY two words. The words can be repeated many times, but those are the only two words the clue-giver can offer for each name. After all the names are gone through, the third round continues in the same manner, except the clue-giver must remain SILENT and instead acts out the names, just like Charades. After all three rounds, the team with the most points (i.e. the most correctly guessed names in all three rounds) wins.

Since we've been playing a while, here's the most important thing we've learned: Always listen to the clue-giving with the other team(s)! Even if you're not the team guessing, it's smart to listen to the other names that are in the bowl, since chances are you'll come across them in the next rounds.

Last night, the festivities took place at my friend's house. Here are the yummy snacks he made, along with the bowl of names on the upper left corner of the photo. Since there were 12 people playing the game, we had 72 names in the bowl...

As far as the names in our bowl last night, they covered the spectrum. Since there were so many NU people there, some of our clues were VERY Northwestern oriented, including "Willy the Wildcat", "Virgil Johnson" and "Sherrill Milnes" (the later two are professors at NU). Of course, there were the usuals like Buddha, Jack Daniels and President Obama; there were also tributes to the recently passed, including Ed McMahon and Michael Jackson. We had normal celebrities, including Goldie Hawn, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Lily Tomlin, and Wanda Sykes, but those paled in comparison to names like "Nessa Rose" (a character in the musical Wicked), Donna Martin (Tori Spelling's character in 90210), and Donkey (specifically the one Mary rode in the bible, not the character in Shrek). But please don't think we're all fluff- we also had names like Theodore Dostoevsky and Machmud Ahmadinejad.(Yeah, imagine acting THOSE out!)
We had a great time, though I'm pretty sure my friend's neighbors were happy to see us leave... I mean, how long can you take a bunch of people yelling (at the top of the their lungs, since we're all performance majors and NEED to be heard) random names for hours on end?

I hope you're having a good Wednesday so far!