Literati, ETC.

I've gotten into the habit of putting up pictures with my posts, but when I looked for an image of the board game we played tonight, Literati, I could not find one (and I was too lazy to grab the digital camera).

It's not surprising I could not find an image online. This game was created and produced by a group of students majoring in marketing at the local university. My husband found it years ago at a garage sale for one dollar. (Still, I thought there might be one on ebay - seems EVERYTHING is available online these days!)

It plays a lot like Balderdash (or the dictionary game), but I think it's far better. There are five categories, four require the creation of a definition (general, science, foreign and slang), and the fifth is a quote for which you need to guess the author.

I was really proud of some of my kids' definitions. My 10-year old came up with "rough draft" for the Italian word "prefisso," and my 13-year old defined "rhizome" as "the part of a plant cell that produces food."

It wasn't all seriousness, though, and we were laughing pretty hard by the end of the game. There were some pretty silly definitions too. It was also funny that my husband tried as hard as he could not to choose my definition for each word, but he almost always did choose it, which gave me points! :-)

We used to play this game with friends of ours, and we'd be nearly rolling on the floor laughing - more so as it got later!

I'm disappointed that Literati was not picked up and marketed by a game company. Currently I know someone who is throwing his hat in the ring as a game inventor; his name is A.J. McCaffrey. He's got great ideas and a great vision. His goal is to help people see more through creatively stretching their minds and in seeing more, perhaps being able to create more and in this way help the world to be a better place.

Promoting creative games is something we always want to do, so . . .

. . . more about him and his games in an upcoming post, but for now - on a related note - consider the following picture. What is it?