Party Fun!

The Cartoon Character Game

Here's a favorite party game of mine. Grab a piece of paper and fold it in half the long way so you have two columns. In one column write the names of animals that pop into your head. In the other column write any adjective that pops into your head.

So you'll get two lists that look a bit like this.

dog                     smelly
octopus                 dirty
parakeet                obese
orangutan               stupid
rhino                   greedy
pirahna                 hallucinating
polar bear              slippery
fox                     athletic
giant ground sloth      self righteous
goat                    religious
tiger                   slutty
mastodon                homicidal

So you cut up the words in the lists and put the animals in one pile and the adjectives in another. Then the people playing the game pull one piece of paper from each pile. So you'll get an adjective-animal pair like 'hallucinating rhino'. The next step is the fun one - you have to draw a cartoon of that hallucinating rhino.

So I like to split up and do my drawing away from everyone else I'm playing with and then show them once I'm done and see if they can guess the adjective and the animal. The animal is usually the easy part to guess but the adjective can sometimes be tricky to illustrate. Once you have a couple of cartoon characters you can have everyone cut out their cartoon character and paste them on a larger sheet of paper. So you get what looks like a party of cartoon characters; sort of like those gatefold Mad Magazine cartoons.

So then you can come up with funny conversations these characters might be having with one another, and write them in comic bubbles. What would a 'slutty pirahna' say to a 'homicidal parakeet'? You could take that idea a lot of places.

Anyway I found this game to be pretty successful at parties for getting people relaxed and interacting with one another. As long as your friends aren't insecure about their drawing ability they'll usually play along and have a good time.

I'll post some drawings that were made during a round soon.