They'll only let me have one a year!

That´s a lame excuse !

Not sure if the regular participants in this forum already knew, but yesterday was our Gatsby's birthday!

Happy birthday!!

Yes, I knew, but didn't get a chance to mention. Hope you had a great birthday, Gats!

So did I, sent him a PM as I didnt see him online at the same time as I was

Happy belated birthday Gats!

Thanks, folks. Yes, 'tis true ... as of last Friday I now have an extra ring in my trunk to be counted. 'Tis truer that I'm running out of 'trunk space', too. But I'll worry about that part next year.

Oh ~ and thank you for the PM, szabs !

Sorry I missed your birthday, Gats! Hope it was happy!

I saw a note in the new "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover" game that we have lost a game. Which game did we lose?

The one you didn't play

We lost "Let's Go On A Cruise", Starfish.

Oh, thanks, Gats. I'll be sorry to see that one go, but it was one of the more time consuming ones that I frequently ran out of time for.

Today is guitargoddess's birthday ! Here's hoping she's having a festive one!

Well, she's here hanging out with us, isn't she? What could be better?

Happy birthday, GG! Hope it's a great one!

Thanks! It is a pretty good one, and am glad to be here hanging out playing Chains!

Yikes ! I went through the games and (finally) got everything current - meaning that all topics that have sat idle for two weeks were deleted and that the older locked ones (left there only for folks to refer back to, if they wished) were deleted as well. As it turns out? Five [not so] "active" games are no longer on the boards, after an apparent lack of interest/participation in them. Naturally, then, this means that there is room for five new games, if anyone has any ideas in that direction . If anything comes to mind, shoot the idea through down here in this discussion -- to see what others think, and/or if they think it's something they/we might find playable, etc. We need some fresh *stuff*, that seems clear. In observing the current cycle of things, and the trends in it, it looks like History games aren't faring so well ... but word games are, as usual, flourishing. BUT ~ cycles in the Chain Games change like the seasons, historically. Two months from now, History might be hot again and word games might be in the basement. At any rate, if anyone can think of any new ideas and/or interesting games? Feel free to present them.

We could try something like 20 Questions again? Would anyone enjoy that?

I really like those 20 Questions-type games ! O' course, that's just me - I can't speak for anyone else by saying so. The biggest problem with them (and even with the "Which One Is True", that is currently still active ~ but struggling), as I remember, is regularity of visits to the chain games. If the person with the answer stops showing up, or only shows up once a week? It can really clog up the progress, naturally. And that's not damning a player for not popping in daily down here - it wouldn't be fair to do that since folks have lives outside of the internet that consume and/or otherwise clutter their schedules, etc. I think the 'ticket', if there is one?, is to try and take a game format like 20 Questions and somehow revise it to fit the way things roll in here. Make it more "chain game friendly", if that makes sense? A quick look will show that, clearly, the most successful and popular games in play at this time (and for a while, now) are those that require little or no research, can be played with a speedy run through the list (if time is an issue, which it is for many people), and so forth. 20 Questions has part of that equation perfectly right. No research required to play it, which works. I'm guessing it's the duration of such games that kills them? So, if there could be some game that employs the idea of, say, 20 Questions and lands it into a quick-ish and playable map? I think that'd be terrific! That's where application of 'thinking caps' comes in, however ... and it can be really hard to take a tried-and-true game schematic that works at a 3-D get-together and make it work in a cyber situation. But it's always worth a try ! If a game gets a start, and doesn't work? Heck, no harm done. It will time out, eventually, and there's no problem with that. Sometimes it's surprising what DOES 'fly' ... or at least I think so. Example: when I started that *Scrambles (6,7,6)* thing I thought that it would likely die in less than a month. I couldn't even figure out a smooth way of offering the instructions for it! Who in the heck would enjoy such a hot mess of an idea . Turns out it plays rather well, and has done so for quite a while now. So, I reckon my point is: let's try 20 Questions (or any other idea you all might come up with) and see what happens. If it gets gummed up, we can try to tweak it to make it play better. Chances are? It might play well *as is* from the get-go! Bottom line: we'll not know until we try it. Or RE-try it. If it doesn't flow, or gets stuck? No problem. We'll try something else, yes?

One other thing, while I'm sitting here rambling away. It is my solid opinion that the chain games ought to be a fair and interesting blend of challenging and breezy. In other words, I (personally) enjoy some of the more difficult and/or time-consuming "research" games. I've always been keenly aware, though, that other players do not. So for every "Six Degrees of Wikipedia" there really HAS to be a "Keep One, Drop One" or "Word Tag" to balance out the 'personality' of the games. Given that, no idea for a new Chain is a bad idea.

I'm part of the cause of the "Which One Is True?" one since I've not been on for a couple of days. Life gets in the way sometimes, but I always come back.

Yes, I've been guilty of "gumming up" that one, too. But that game's never been so gummed up as 20 Questions used to get, and I think the reason is this: Which One Is True features one person as the "game leader" for a maximum of four responses ~ then another game leader takes over. 20 Questions requires one person to be the game leader for possibly 20 responses, and if the game leader turns out to be someone who doesn't visit quite regularly, the game spends most of its time at the bottom of page 2.

None of this solves the dilemma, of course. "4 Questions" simply wouldn't work.

Didn't we also have a game where people had to guess things until they had an idea of what the category was, or something? Like, someone gave the first item, and then people had to guess what they were going for by filling in the rest of the list? Could that maybe be adapted down to not relying on people to come back all the time?

That was Categories. It was interesting but had the same problem with slow play. The play on that one could possibly be changed to giving several of the clues at once, instead of one at a time, so the game moves faster. It still relies on the frequent return of the game leader, though.

Typically when I log in to Fun Trivia, Chain Games will say "1 viewing" or "3 viewing" or occasionally a higher number, like "9 viewing". I logged in the other day and it said "92 viewing"! It made me wonder ~ did we have a topic of particular interest going on in one of our games that had suddenly captured the attention of many? 92 people didn't suddenly stumble upon our Chain Games forum ~ someone or something had to be directing them here. Our viewing audience is back to normal now, so I guess we'll never know what briefly brought so many folks to view our little corner of the world. But I'm oh so curious!

I find that happens a lot Starfish usually about 2-4 pm FT time. If you click Who? at the top of the page you can see who is viewing. It is usually all search spiders off of Google or Yahoo and they are all viewing the same thread, it is weird. I've also noticed the Feedback Forum gets viewing numbers in the hundreds.

What happened to Uxbridge English Dictionary? Has it been culled. A shame if so, as it was funny and imaginative.

Yes, that was an awesome one (even though I never mustered up enough cleverness to play it much, reading it was a lot of fun). But, sigh, it was one of that recent handful that sat untouched for more than two weeks, so ended up deleted. Actually, it was probably idle for longer than that ... I'll typically bump a game (I'm not sure what procedure the other moderators here use, but *deletes* don't happen very often) several times to give it a chance if I see it languishing at the bottom of the list before the game gets the boot. I'd absolutely not mind seeing 'Uxbridge' reappear, tried again ! But if we resurrect it, we'll have to keep an eye on it and/or make attempts to keep it at least a little bit active. Heck, if one of us pops in only once every fourteen days and comes up with some sort of post? It'll keep it going.

It's at 106 currently and it's barely 7:30am FT.

There's my theory out the window!

I guess this happens much more frequently than I realized!

I have noticed the numbers also go through the roof in the FunTrivia Lounge, Feedback, and Tipping Competitions.

Check here, scroll down a bit, Who's Online?