I'm not quite getting the instructions for Telepathic Tag with prompts and options—are the players saying exactly one of the options? I'll see if I've got it right...

Take a game with seven people (which seems a decent group) and three options, which in the first round are The Star, The Spider and the The Shrimp. A picks The Star; B, D, E and F pick the Spider, and C and G pick The Shrimp. By Majority Scoring, A gets 0 pts, B, D, E and F get 3 pts with each other (and 0 pts with anyone else), and C and G get 1 point with each other.

Next round: The Fish, The Flowerpot and The Flag. A, B, F and G pick The Fish; C, D and E pick The Flowerpot; nobody picks The Flag. Now A has 3 points with B, F and G; B has 3 pts with G, and 6 pts with F; C has 2 pts with D and E and 1 pt with G; D 2 pts G, 5 pts with E, and 3 pts with F; E has 3 pts with F, F has 2 pts with G. All of those are reciprocal, and if I haven't said a combination, it's 0.

Have I understood the game? Is there more to it than that? Did you pre-print grids for your players or did everybody draw them how they will? Could your non-writing player just turn over the card that associated with his choice? Because I think I will have two non-writing players, but it occurred to me that if we had two (identical) decks with the choices, those players could just flip up their cards. Or, potentially, we could have seven identical decks and everybody could flip up their choices, but that would be a lot of prep. Hm. Thinking this out, but it would potentially be a game we could all play together, which isn't usual for three adults and four kids aged 10, 9, 6 and 4.

Oh--did you need 54 option-options? Would a smaller deck still be entertaining,

Thanks,

-V.

I *was* kind of rushing that description, wasn't I? I think you have the scoring right -- although I do think that minority scoring may, in the long run, make more sense and be more satisfying.

If you were playing with a prompt, the situation would be more-or-less the same except that the first round would described more like, "The Pear was the prompt, and the options were The Star, The Spider, and The Shrimp."

As the number of players go up and the number of rounds go down, you might want to switch to Lowest plus Highest pair score instead of Lowest times Highest -- either that, or start everyone off with 1 point in each column, to avoid sad, sad zeros.

On to the non-writing implementation.

I did not pre-print score grids; we just kept columns on standard-sized paper. R just leaned over the table to point out his card. If your non-writers are sufficiently secretive (and I wouldn't see why not), they could whisper their choice to whatever adult is keeping their score sheet. The whole game operates heavily on the honor system, anyways, so I don't think you need to go so far as to have separate hidden choices.

Forgot to come back and report... Telepathic Tag was a success! The 4-yr-old decided he wanted to read Calvin and Hobbes instead of playing, so we played with six: three grupps, a 10-yr-old, a 9-yr-old and a 5-yr-old. We played with a deck of 20 cards, and took turns choosing the three options. By the end, the smalls had lost interest in the scoring system (not sure why, as they are very competitive) but we had a lot of fun sending our thoughts and making faces, and finding out who had what. And the smalls asked to play again the next day, so that's all right.

Thanks,

-V.

Fantastic! Were the 20 cards regular playing cards, Loteria, or something else?

Sorry, forgot to come back and check. I made the cards, based on a quick brainstorming from myself, my Best Reader and my Perfect Non-Reader. They were all nouns, if I remember correctly, and I put the word and a picture on each slip and printed them on Business Card stock. I don't have the file with me, but they were mostly along the lines of "table" "airplane" and "ocean", with a couple of odd ones ("anger" "Barack Obama" "battle") thrown in for fun. My idea was that we would have the cards for playing again, but so far we have not got together another game.

Thanks,

-V.