Star Wars: The Exquisite Corpse Version

This is about to go very viral, very fast. Star Wars Uncut divided the entire original movie into 15-second intervals. Fans from around the world claimed each of those intervals and made their own versions of those 15 seconds. These were then stitched back together into an entire film.

Why post it on a game site? Because it is, essentially, a high tech variation on the parlor game called exquisite corpse, in which someone makes a drawing, folds the paper so only the edge of the drawing can be seen, and then others continue the drawing without reference to the entire picture. The result looks like this:

Drawing by Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Max Morise, Joan Miró, c. 1926.

Star Wars has such profound cultural capital that everyone can understand these moments no matter how crudely recreated, and they flow together into a surreal, ever-shifting, experience. It's almost impossible to watch all at once, but there are real moments of genius here and there. It is Star Wars re-imagined by the hive-mind of the internet fan community.

I Think They Mean It

"What's all this then?"

From the curiously titled Children's Games With Things, by Iona and Peter Opie

Snapdragon: A Festive Children's Game Played With Flaming Food

Thou art easier swallowed than a flapdragon.

Wm. Shakespeare, Love's Labor's Lost

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Alice is introduced to various fanciful insects by a gnat the size a chicken. To an American child, these creatures appeared to be little more than whimsical creations, but one insect had special connotations for the British:

A snap-dragon-fly

`Look on the branch above your head,' said the Gnat, `and there you'll find a snap-dragon-fly. Its body is made of plum-pudding, its wings of holly-leaves, and its head is a raisin burning in brandy.'

`And what does it live on?'

`Frumenty and mince pie,' the Gnat replied; `and it makes is nest in a Christmas box.'

I'd never really paused over this reference to a "snapdragon fly", but the most recent episode of Masterpiece Mystery, an adaptation of the Inspector Poirot novel Hallowe'en Party, included an alarming scene of kids playing a party game during a Halloween celebration. Children kept reaching into a flaming bowl, grabbing something, and popping it in their mouths while chanting "snip snap dragon." You can find the scene (for as long as it stays up on Youtube), at the 7:00 mark here. I hadn't the faintest idea what they were doing until we looked it up and learned that it's an old game (no one knows just how old) called snapdragon or flapdragon.

from Poirot: Halowe'en Party (2010)

Here's how Martin Gardner describes it in The Annotated Alice:

Snapdragon (or flapdragon) is the name of a pastime that delighted Victorian children during the Christmas season. A shallow bowl was filled with brandy, raisins were tossed in, and the brandy set on fire. Players try to snatch the raisins from the flickering blue flames and pop them, still blazing, into their mouths. The burning raisins also were called snapdragons.

The chant that accompanies the game goes like this:

Here he comes with flaming bowl / Don't he mean to take his toll!
Snip! Snap! Dragon!
Take care you don't take too much / Be not greedy in your clutch!
Snip! Snap! Dragon!
With his blue and lapping tongue / Many of you will be stung!
Snip! Snap! Dragon!
For he snaps at all that comes / Snatching at his feast of plums!
Snip! Snap! Dragon!
But Old Christmas makes him come / Though he looks so fee! fa! fum!
Snip! Snap! Dragon!
Don't 'ee fear him but be bold / Out he goes his flames are cold!
Snip! Snap! Dragon!

Snapdragon is normally a Christmas tradition, although it's played at Halloween as well. There's no clear indication of the game's origins, but some sources trace it to the ancient Greeks or Druids, which seems rather fanciful. It pops up several times in the works of Shakespeare, where he uses "flapdragon"  and "snapdragon" interchangeably to indicate something that's easy to swallow. You know: like flaming fruit. That pushes the game back to the 16th century at least. Like so many indoor amusements, it became traditional during the Victorian era, because nothing says "fun for kids" like sticking your hand in a burning bowl of liquor.

I'm annoyed that I even have to add this, but if you try this game at home, please remember that fire is hot and if you're injured it's totally your own fault, not mine.

Parlor Game: Alphabet Stories

Players: 2 or more

Equipment: None necessary, but if you'd like to randomize topics and starting letters, then have some paper and pencils on hand.

We've been playing this game around the dinner table lately, but it's also good for long drives or as a party game. It's adapted from other alphabetical conversation games in which you write down a series of subjects on slips of paper, choose one randomly, and then take turns having a conversation on that subject. The catch is that each new sentence in the conversation must begin with the next letter in the alphabet.

Alphabet Stories uses the same structure. If you want to keep it simple, you can just pick a subject, or you can write 5 or 6 subjects on pieces of paper and draw one randomly. These can be broad subjects like "Christmas" or "Summer" or "Harry Potter," or narrow ones like "Homer's Odyssey set in contemporary New York" or "Santa and the Easter Bunny go on a pro wrestling tour." The subject can be as broad or as specific, as serious or funny, as high-minded or immature as you like.

The idea is to use this subject to create a story, with each person taking turns adding a single sentence to the story. The sentence needs to connect to the previous sentence and must be on topic. It also needs to begin with a word that starts with the next letter in the alphabet. You can start anywhere in the alphabet that you like, going from A-Z, or from M all the way through and back to L.

For example, if we start with the letter "S" and take the Santa & Easter bunny idea, the story could go like this:

Player 1) "Santa entered the ring in his red tights, tucked his beard into his shirt, and looked dubiously at his new partner."

Player 2) "'This is gonna be a bloodbath,'" growled Jolly Old St. Nick.

Player 3) "Us Leporidae are natural fighters thanks to our giant feet," the Easter Bunny shot back, waving the appendage in question.

And so on.  You can set limits and rules so that people are "out" if they don't come up with a sentence within a few seconds, or if the other players think they aren't following the narrative closely enough. But, really, this is best played as a casual game, particularly with kids on a long trip. The stories get silly very quickly, and often take off on funny tangents. You don't need to set particular time limits, but do try to keep the game moving quickly: people come up with wilder ideas when they don't stop to think for too long.

Games Without Pieces: Ghosts and Superghosts

Open any book of decorum or household advice from the Victorian period and you’re likely to find countless tips on how the Good Hostess can keep her Guests properly entertained in order to avoid Crushing Shame and the inevitable Whispered Comments. These parlor games, as they came to be known, range from silly little time wasters to fairly intense brain scramblers.

Ghosts (also called Ghost) was one of the more popular parlor games well into the 1950s, when James Thurber could still write about it as though it was a common pastime. The rules are very simple. A player thinks of a word, and says the first letter. The next player adds another letter, which continues that word without completing it. This continues, with each player trying to add a letter to the growing word without making a complete word. Proper nouns and abbreviations don’t count.

If a person adds a letter that forms a complete word, he loses the round and gets one point. The next player is allowed to challenge the previous player to reveal his word. If the challenged player can’t produce a complete, valid word, then he loses the round and gets one point. For instance, if player 3 adds a “Z” to create “TEZ,” player 4 can challenge him to produce his full word. Since player 3 was bluffing and has no word beginning with the letter “TEZ,” he loses the challenge. The loser of a round gets 1 point, and players are eliminated when they reach 3 points. Last player standing is the winner.

For instance, I think of the word FIRING, and say the letter “F.” The next person, building on the F, thinks of the word FERAL and says “E.” (“FE” is not a valid word under Scrabble rules, which is what people should use for this game.) The third person can’t think of a letter that doesn’t make a complete word, so he blurts out “B” and hopes his bluff will work. The fourth player challenges player three to produce his word. Unable to think of the word “FEBRILE,” player 3 fails the challenge and loses the round, earning 1 point. If he earns 2 more, he’s out of the game.

Although Ghosts is a pleasant game suitable for all ages and mixed company, Superghosts is an absolute brain sprainer. It preoccupied the mind of James Thurber so much that often he couldn’t fall asleep until he’d figured out all the words that could be made from certain letter groupings.

Superghosts is simply Ghosts in both directions. People don’t have to start spelling a word at the beginning, but can (and usually do) start spelling it at the absolute hardest possible place. I’ll let Thurber describe how this game haunted his mind:

I spent two hours hunting for another word besides “PHLOX” that has “HLO” in it. I finally found seven: MATCHLOCK, DECATHLON, PENTATHLON, HYDROCHLORIC, CHLORINE, CHLOROFORM, and MONTHLONG. There are more than a dozen others, beginning with “PHLO,” but I had to look them up in a dictionary, and that doesn’t count…

Starting words in the middle and spelling them in both directions lifts the pallid pastime of Ghosts out of the realm of children’s parties and ladies’ sewing circles and makes it a game to test the mettle of the mature adult mind. The Superghost aficionado is a moody fellow, given to spelling to himself at table, not listening to his wife, and starting dully at his frightened children, wondering why he didn’t detect, in yesterday’s game, that “CKLU” is the gusts of “LACKLUSTER,” and priding himself on having stumped everybody with “NEHE,” the middle of “SWINEHERD.”

The Oxford Guide to Word Games includes a few letter clusters as examples of just how maddening this game can get. Can you make words that include the letter groupings HQ, PK, XW, ADQ, EKD, GNP, PEV, SPB, and THM?