Neva invented this game for us and we have had a late night candle light “party” playing it (just the three of us, Dad already gone to bed). We laughed so hard our belly muscles ached. It’s so simple but so much fun and a guaranteed cosy together time.
To play the game, give every player two identical sheets of paper and have them write a word or a phrase that fills the gap in this sentence: Write as many _____ as possible. This same sentence is pictured in Dutch below:
So, for example, Simon wrote down “ways to know down a snow wall” and Neva wrote down “ways to warm up your water”. All the topics written down should have something to do with winter.
The sheets of paper are then collected and shuffled. Every round, players pull one sheet from the pile, at random, and that’s what they’ve got to do: write down as many (whatever this particular sheet says) as possible! Just one player pulls the sheet and reads it aloud and then all the players quickly write down as many things as possible that fit that particular category. They can be whimsical and unrealistic, too. Like I wrote down “use a fire spitting dragon” for warming up water and Neva had “walk around with a radiator”. For younger kids, no writing down is necessary, as long as they remember a few of their options after the others are done writing. Whoever has more options, wins, but it’s more about coming up with the weirdest scenarios than points, as you’ll soon see!
And, of course, it doesn’t have to be winter themed. It can be anything, but do keep it themed. As Richard Feynman famously reminded us, constraints unleash creativity.
Geeks out of the box 