When you’re in a dinner party kind of situation and the conversation seems to be drifting towards some sort of standstill, there are several things you can do to rectify the situation. You can bring out the “big boys’ alcohol”—the whisky, the brandy, the port, the strong stuff that only ever seems to come out at dinner parties. You can invite everyone to retire to a different room where you can regale them with tales of how you acquired each and every record in your substantial Bavarian folk music collection. If you’re a Cockney, you can gather around the upright piano and have a knees-up. Or you can resort to some sort of game.
Dinner party games aren’t quite the same as “board game night” games. Whipping out a copy of Power Grid or Agricola is inadvisable unless everyone at the dinner table is an avid boardgamer already. No; something that is either quick and easy to play, or something that everyone knows is what is called for. On the “something that everyone knows” front, there are mainstays like Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly and all manner of things like that. The downside to these is that they take quite a long time to play. So that leaves the other alternative: something that is quick and easy.
You could play Hangman. But that’s a bit primary school, as is I Spy. You could play Murder in the Dark, but you can guarantee that someone has forgotten the rules because there is no one person in the world who can remember all the rules to Murder in the Dark. You could play Musical Chairs, but there’s always some killjoy bastard who doesn’t want to get up and dance. (Usually me.)
Or you could play Eat Poop, You Cat!
This is not as sinister as it sounds. In fact, it’s a very simple, quick and easy game to play. All you need are enough pieces of paper and drawing implements as you have participants. The more the merrier, generally, but the optimum number of people is somewhere around six to eight.
This game is very straightforward. There are no winners and losers. It’s purely for fun and entertainment. The way it works is as follows:
1. Everyone around the table writes a short sentence on their piece of paper. For brevity’s sake, you may wish to limit the maximum number of words. But generally someone will go over the limit anyway, so that’s a largely pointless endeavour in most cases.
2. Everyone passes their piece of paper to the person on their left (or right, if you prefer going that way. You big freak.) and the new owner of the paper has to draw a picture representing the sentence.
3. The person who has just drawn a picture folds over the original sentence and passes the paper around again, so the next person can only see the picture.
4. This next person has to write a sentence representing what they think the picture is showing.
5. They then fold over the picture, so the next person can only see the sentence.
6. The process repeats until each piece of paper has gone right around the table and back to its original owner, alternating picture-sentence-picture-sentence.
7. The papers are then unfolded.
8. Hilarity ensues.
Like Chinese Whispers, the game often ends up in a rather different place to where it began. It plays on people’s imaginations and creativity, and it’s pretty rare—and actually fairly undesirable—for people to manage to keep the meaning of the original sentence intact.
There’s a whole website dedicated to this game with some fantastic example playthroughs. I can highly recommend you play it the next time you start boring your dinner party guests. Rather than being remembered as that deathly dull host, you’ll be remembered as a Super Fun Person! Which is good. Unless you really don’t like hosting dinner parties, in which case you may actively wish to bore your guests so much that they never return.