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This one’s a simple game that can easily be played via IM conversations, or in a car with two or more players, or basically anytime you’re bored…  even by yourself.

What you do is pick a category, usually one with very many possible entries (”Song Titles” is my favorite category) then players take turns giving an entry in the category that starts with the last letter of the previous entry.  Using the song titles example with a random starting point:

Like a Rolling Stone –> Eat it –>  Turn, Turn, Turn –> Never Gonna Give You Up –> Plush…  and so on

Another simple IM game.

In this one, each player picks a wikipedia page. When both have picked a page, they race to see who can connect the two pages using only links on either page. The first one to get from one page to the other (in either direction) gets the point.

You can add additional rules as desired like “No using the ‘what links here?’ button”, or “no categories”… but it’s pretty much on the honor system.

So when I was a kid, I remember playing a game called JOTTO. This was a game somewhat similar to the classic game Mastermind. Why do I bring this up? Recently I discovered that this makes a great two player game using Instant Messengers.

Each player picks a 5-letter word (no proper names allowed, each letter must be unique… making Jotto a bad name for the game since it violates both those rules) and players take turns attempting to guess the other player’s words. After each guess, the guesser is told how many letters in his guess are in the word he’s trying to get (nothing is revealed with respect to letter positions). Whoever guesses the other word first wins… if the player who guessed first wins, the other player gets one more guess and if they solve it in that guess, it’s a tie. In the event a mis-clue was given (for instance, the player says “1 letter” when the guess really contained 2 letters) the game is immediately aborted and not counted unless sabotage is suspected, then the offending player gets punched in the eye. If the player who was lied to successfully solves the word before the other player, they get double points instead of throwing out the game… unless they lied, too, then the players shouldn’t be playing this game.

Here are some fun words to help get you started:

• Hydra
• Axiom
• Squab
• Husky
• Doubt