Wednesday, January 7, 2009

The Alphabet; Nightmare Mode

I do strange things in my sleep. Not actively, but my brain likes to go out on these wild adventures while the rest of me is unconscious. Last night, it thought up a new game that it's been playing all morning, so I figured I'd share what the plucky bastard came up with. It's called The Alphabet; Nightmare Mode. The object of the game is to compose a conversation between two or more people (or maybe even a monologue...though that might be a bit more difficult) using sentences in which each word starts with a sequential letter of the alphabet. You're permitted to use pronouns and conjunctions freely so that your sentences don't sound like a conversation between two cavemen. Numbers are also fair game. An optional ruling (if you're feeling generous with yourself) is that you can use sounds that sound like the letter in question (like using A as "hey" or U as "you" or you can get REALLY generous and use eh or uh as "a"). Finally, you can start your conversation at any point in the alphabet (but you have to do all 26 letters in order; once you reach Z, circle back around to A). Once you've cycled through the alphabet once, you can cycle through again as many times as you need (and may even stop in the middle once you've gone through all the letters once). Here's an example:

Person 1: Zoo animals broke my car.
Person 2: Don't even freak, Gary.
Gary: How?!...I just...!! K...
Person 2: Look, man, nobody operates painlessly.
Gary: Question, Ryan.
Ryan: Shoot.
Gary: That UR Vespa?
Ryan: Why?
Gary: Xactly. Your zoo always breaks cars, destroying everything.

As you can see, I'm not very good at this game. But I've thought of two variant games based on the premise as well. In one version, you compose a conversation and may use your words in any order you please...however, each letter of the alphabet can only be used to begin a word once. The second version is the same as the original, just do the alphabet backwards instead of forwards.

Yeah, this little activity has kept me frustrated and amused all day. Post the best conversations you come up with!

No comments: