Balderdash a.k.a. Fictionary

We used this game to expose our first year students to some of our old, specialized, & cool dictionaries, e.g.:

$ A dictionary of the underworld, British & American, being the vocabularies of crooks, criminals, racketeers, beggars and tramps, convicts, the commercial underworld, the drug traffic, the white slave traffic, spivs

$ British English A to Zed

$ Dictionary of yoga

Bring pencils & cards. Divide into groups of about five. Each round:

1. Everyone gets 5 minutes to look through the dictionaries & try to find a word that the others won’t know.

2. One person announces their word.

a. If anyone else knows the meaning of the word, that person must say so, and the group uses another word.

3. Once a word has been found that no one knows, the person with the dictionary writes down on a card one dictionary definition or a paraphrase. The other players write on their cards either a believable definition for the word, or an amusing definition.

4. All the others pass their cards to the person with the dictionary.

5. When the person with the dictionary has all the definitions, s/he shuffles them together with the real definition, and then reads out all the definitions.

6. The others vote for what they think is the real definition.

7. When all have voted, the true definition is revealed, and the round is scored. A player gets a point for:

a. having voted for the true definition

b. every vote cast for the definition you wrote

c. the person with the dictionary gets a point only if no one voted for the true definition.