Tabletop Thursday: Car Games

In honor of my car breaking down, I thought I’d feature three great games you might not know that can be played in the car, on the roadside, or (politely) in the waiting room at the repair shop. No need to take your eyes off the road!

Love My Love:

The goal of this game is to fill in the blanks of this poem with words that start with a given letter, and take it in turn to work your way all the way through the alphabet making up fictional love interests, the more ridiculous the better.

I love my love with a(n) _[letter]_ because he is/she is/they are _[positive trait]_.
I hate my love with a(n) _[letter]_ because he is/she is/they are _[negative trait]_.
His/Her/Their name is _[first name]_,
He/She/They live(s) in _[location]_,
And I feed him/her/them on _[food 1]_ and _[food 2]_.

The basic Love My Love poem.

The Minister’s Cat:

This game has two variants: collaborative and competitive. In both, your goal on your turn is to come up with a version of the sentence, “The minister’s cat is a _[adjective]_ cat.”, using a word or short phrase beginning with the correct letter. Use common sense when determining how short a phrase should be. The minister’s cat can be a mouse eating cat, but it probably shouldn’t be a major league baseball playing cat, at least not more than once or twice a game. In the collaborative variant, players take it in turn to go through the alphabet, much like Love My Love. In the competitive variant, begin with A and take turns providing sentences with an A word until someone takes too long to come up with one or uses a word that’s been used before. The sweet spot here is usually about three seconds, but scrabble geniuses may want to cut that down to one second, and little kids should get as long as they need to come up with a suitable word or admit to being stumped. Once someone has been stumped, they take a point and the group moves onto the next letter of the alphabet. (This is a good game to skip Q and X if you’re so inclined.) The player with the fewest points is the winner at the end of the road trip or alphabet.

Botticelli

My family’s rules for Botticelli are as follows:

One player is the Braintrust and the others are guessers. The Braintrust may pick the music, if appropriate. They also pick a real person or character, ideally someone they know a fair amount about. They reveal only the first letter of this person’s last name, unless the character is much better known by their first name or a single stage name. (The rule that such a name should be used instead is called the Madonna rule, except when I forget and call it the Beyoncé rule, as examples of the kind of people you should use the first/stage names of instead.)

Guessers may then “call in” by saying “Ring, ring.” The Braintrust answers, “Botticelli, you are on the air.” Only one person may be “on the air” at once. Once they’ve been answered, the guesser then poses a yes or no question where the answer is yes for some person whose name starts with that letter, attempting to stump the Braintrust on whom they are referring to. (The Braintrust may not use the internet to help them answer.) If the Braintrust can think of a person who fits the question with an appropriate name, they may say “No, I am not [name],” and “hang up” on the guesser. They need not think of the person who the guesser intended to ask about, only of some person who fits the question and is not their chosen person. (For example, if the letter is K, one might ask, “Did I have a dream?” intending to clue Martin Luther King Jr., and be told “No, I am not Kirby (of Kirby’s Dreamland),” and they would have to try again with a different clue if they intended to guess MLK.) If the answer to the question is yes for their person, and they cannot think of any other person with an applicable name who fits the question, they must ask the guesser, “Of whom are you thinking?”. The guesser then says who they were thinking of, and if it is the chosen person, they have won and will be the next Braintrust. If it is not, the guesser has earned a question (see below). If the question does not fit the guessed person, but the Braintrust cannot think of a person who fits the question with an appropriate name, they should say “You’ve stumped me,” indicating that the question is not applicable to their character. The guesser also earns a question in this case.

When the guesser earns a question, they may ask any yes or no question about the person. The Braintrust should try to answer yes or no wherever feasible; they should also qualify if the answer is misleading (for example, if the person is MLK and they were asked whether the person was famous as an author), ambiguous (for example, if the person is not known to be dead or alive and they were asked if they were dead) or not able to be reasonably answered (for example, if the person is Jesus and they were asked whether the person is real, as opposed to fictional). If the Braintrust doesn’t know or can’t answer, the guesser can ask another question instead, or the Braintrust may look up the answer if they would like. Some examples of good questions to start with include:

• “Am I real/fictional?”
• “Am I alive/dead?” (For fictional characters, they are dead if, as of the end of the work they appear in, they were dead. Ambiguous cases can be answered as such without earning a second question.)
• “Am I male/female presenting?” (We’ve switched from “Am I male/female”, which would be misleading, to this phrasing. “Am I a woman/a man?” could also be used.)
• (For real people) “Am I primarily known from politics/entertainment/science?”
• (For fictional characters) “Am I primarily known from books/movies/comics/games?”
• “Am I from America/Europe/Asia/South America/Africa/etc?”
• “Am I from the 20th/21st century?” “Am I from the 19th century or earlier?” “Am I from the Renaissance/medieval times/the classical era?”
• (For fictional characters) “Am I a protagonist/antagonist?”

Once the guesser has asked their question and been answered, or been hung up on, they are no longer “on the air” and any guesser may now call in again. If all guessers agree that they are stumped, or at the end of the car trip/waiting period the Braintrust wins and must reveal their person.