You create for a living all day long, your life is already a game full of wonder, mystery, rainbows and sunshine. Wrong. The hamster wheel in between your ears needs a break just like everyone else, or sometimes it needs to be spun in a different direction than you’ve been grinding away at all day, week, month, year.
What are the games that inspire you? Get you out of a rut? Or combat your inherited stubbornness and make you see an idea from a completely new angle?
You need to be around other like-minded folks or those diametrically opposed to everything you stand for and cut loose. Throw on your favorite slippers, pair the wrong wine with the right grilled protein, blast generic smooth jazz, and open the door. Welcome to game night for creatives!
The original creative-thinking category-based party game has been going strong for over 30 years. You have a limited time frame, and if your idea repeats someone else’s, none of you will get points, so in this game, you need to be both fast and original with choosing the right words. And as a creative, if you get zoo animals that start with R, you better be putting down things better than Raccoon, Rabbit, and Rhino. Where my Reindeers, Rattlesnakes, and Ravens at?
There are no set rules. Players can create elaborate stories together or by themselves using the images. Use dice as an ice-breaker at a party, or just as a generator for creative ideas.
The 54 images were designed by Rory O'Connor of Ireland, a trainer in creativity and creative problem-solving. They can be used to arrive at answers or decisions in an indirect and ingenious way. Each jumbo 1" cube has 6 images or icons, with a total of 54 all-different hand-inlaid images that can be mixed in over 10 million ways.
You roll all 9 cubes to generate 9 random images and then use these to invent a story that starts with "Once upon a time..." that uses all 9 elements as part of your narrative.
The objective of this word-guessing party game is to have the player’s partner guess the word without using the word itself or the five additional words listed on the card. Can you explain “chicken” without using the words “feathers”, “egg”, or “coop”? You better. And you better be open to inventing new ways to say the same old thing. Sounds a lot like one of the very basic foundations of creative storytelling, doesn’t it?
Or analog Words With Friends for the younger crowd. Using the letters given to you, make words to gain points. Whoever ends up with the most points, wins! People’s vocabularies are painfully limited. Playing this game will improve your word reservoir. The more words at your disposal, the easier your creative life will become.
Discover a new means of communication in Concept, an easy-to-learn but frequently challenging party game. Using a board covered in icons, you and your fellow players attempt to silently convey concepts such as 'Dinosaur', 'Eiffel Tower', or 'Sigmund Freud’. It’s charades without the acting and it’s not for everyone, but if you like non-verbal communication and creating new ways to express old ideas (see a recurring theme here?) then check it out!
After a day of using your imagination, you might want to seek inspiration from someone else’s life besides your own to help you crack an idea, flesh out a character or deepen a storyline. Invite some friends over and play Table Topics. It’s a conversation/ice breaker game that features a series of questions written on a stack of cards enclosed in a cube box. It comes in over 20 variations for different occasions and types of crowds. Sample questions include: What did you get into trouble for the most when you were young? Would you rather live for a week in the past or the future? What’s your best excuse when you’re pulled over for speeding? Who’s the most interesting person you’ve met on your travels?
And there you have it! A few suggestions to kick off your game night with your group of creative friends. What’s your go-to game? Sound off below…
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Note From Tongal: “Game Night for Creatives" is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Tongal. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and then Pitch us a topic you'd like to write about for the Tongal Blog!
