Lots of Drama this New Year's!

Once again we rang in a new year with tons of hearty laughter with friends.  For the third year, we continued our tradition of celebrating with Phil and Jetta's family and a few other couples from church.  The deal always is that Jetta provides the house and Dave and I provide the entertainment.  This year, thanks to this Christmas gift from Kristen, we were excited to introduce the group to Reverse Charades.  This game couldn't be more straightforward: play traditional charades, only instead of one actor and a team of guessers, there is a crowd of actors and just one guesser trying to get as many cards correct in a minute as possible.  It's chaos, but it's hilarious.

So what happens when 7 people are acting out one word like "Lance Armstrong"?  Well, one is confused and thinks the card means "Louie Armstrong", so she plays a trumpet.  Others are little kids, so they follow her and pretend to play all different instruments.  One person rides a bike.  One person pretends to smoke.  This leaves the guesser yelling out things like "Smoking on a bike!" or "Bike-riding marching  band!"  Mostly what happens, though, is one person starts pretending to do something, like walking a plank.  Then others jump in to be supporting characters, like angry pirates and crocodiles in the water.  When the words on the cards are funny things like "chest bump", "genie in a bottle", "rock band" and "mistletoe", you can just imagine the fun!

The game moved fast, so I didn't get tons of good quality pictures, but here are some of the best and what I think we were trying to act out...

 "Pick up sticks." Somehow it was established that Kirsi was "sticks".

 "Operation."  I think Phil had just removed Kirsi's leg at this point.

 "Go fly a kite."

 ???  Hmm, I really don't know...maybe "hammock"?

Dave said his favorite part of the game was watching the guesser in the hot seat talk all around the word their exasperated team was trying to dramatize.  For example, I think Dave used up the whole minute saying every lyric in the song "We Three Kings of Orient Are", but never "Three Wise Men."  (See someone shoving 3 fingers right in his face?)

 And here are our 2013 New Year's Eve Reverse Charades champions!  This team did beat my own by just 2 points, earning them the coveted Academy Awards I brought along.  What another fantastic New Year's!  Looking for a simple, but awesome group game?  We give this one big thumbs up!

Happy Nooyer's, everyone! :)