Today I found myself in chaplaincy eating lunch and helping Rhiannon celebrate her birthday, initially this involved eating cake (which I was quite happy to do) before we moved on to playing a wink-murder style game (I think) called Mafia. In this game a small number of people are selected as Mafia characters while a doctor and detective are also selected, the others being villagers, by a narrator and all identities are secret. The game proceeds on a day-night cycle and each night the named characters attempt to do their jobs under the direction of the narrator while everyone is 'asleep' overnight during the day the villagers discuss the death (caused by the Mafia) and decide who to lynch, trying to kill off all the Mafia before the villagers are all killed off. This game fails to work with very few players, as we discovered attempting to play it in a group of seven.
After a brief respite we moved on to Ratchet-Screwdriver, a game hitherto only known by its reputation. A detailed explanation of the Quaker version of the game can be found here (apologies for breaking the first rule...) whilst Wikipedia lists it under the name Wink and it has a number of facebook groups. Basically it involves an odd number of people sitting in pairs in a circle, with one person alone, the front person of the pair tries to reach the lone person (in order to kiss them on the cheek) when called by name or by a general call of 'Ratchet-Screwdriver', the back person tries to prevent this. Of course this results in very energetic, if not very fast moving, mildly intimate wrestling match, amongst evenly matched pairs, while less even pairs may find the weaker player immobilised or the stronger person ends the round very quickly. The person who succeeds to kiss the lone player becomes their partner and any other pairs who were active in that round switch their front-back alignment.
We found that seven people was more than sufficient to make this a highly entertaining game, indeed most of the afternoon had passed before we decided to move onto a game that was both less active and less likely to generate carpet burns. The latter point sparked a discussion into the potential perfect surface to play on, we decided that a beach was probably quite good, but that carpet was definitely better than both a smooth lino type surface and a wooden floor. I can well imagine that played on grass (as suggested by the facebook group's picture) the game would result in even less injuries, though for indoors our best solution was jelly. I believe that I have since managed to find a less messy alternative to jelly in the form of Teflon, the surface on non-stick cookware (comments please).
The only failing that we found with the Ratchet-Screwdriver was that the pairings eventually became near static, probably due to the small number of people playing and the relative strengths of the players. In this regard I would be interested in trying a variant for small groups suggested by Wikipedia that it calls Smut (up for a rematch next Friday guys?).
