Unplug Play

MATCHMAKER,
MATCHMAKER

HOW WELL CAN YOU MATCH YOUR SELECTIONS WITH ANOTHER PLAYER IN YOUR GROUP?

Each player comes up with five categories that will lead to many possible answers (see pages 1–9 for ideas) and places them in a hat or facedown on a table mixed in with all of the others.

The objective is to list items that will match with the items on the list of ONE SPECIFIC PLAYER—the player who randomly picks the category in each round.

Player 1 picks a random category from the hat and reads it aloud. All players have two minutes to make a list of as many items in that category as possible that will match with the list of Player 1 (up to ten items).

NOTE: It is important for Player 1 to list as many items as possible (up to ten) on his turn in order to earn as many points as possible. More on that under “Scoring.”

When two minutes are up, Player 1 announces how many items he has on his list. The rest of the players must narrow their lists down to the same number (or less, if they don’t have as many) as Player 1. You cannot have any more listed than Player 1 has.

When all players’ items have been compared to Player 1’s list, all of the players, including Player 1, add up the points they earned for Player 1’s round (see “Scoring”). Player 2 then picks a new random category for her round, and so on. If you pick a category from the hat that was evidently submitted by more than one person and has already been used, pick again.

Player 1 goes first and picks Popular Olympic Sports out of the hat. When two minutes are up, Player 1 announces that he has eight items listed. Every player must now make sure they have no more than eight popular Olympic sports on their lists. So if Player 2 had 10 items on her list, she must CROSS OUT two of them. Once everyone is done finalizing their lists of eight, Player 1 reveals his eight items.

Points are awarded based on the number of matched items. Player 1 (or whichever player chose the category) receives 4 points for each correct match with every other player in the game. All other players receive 10 points for every item they matched on the list of the player who selected the category. For instance, in the above example with Popular Olympic sports, everyone had to match with Player 1. If Player 3 matched six items correctly with Player 1, Player 3 would get 60 points and Player 1 would get 24 points. If Player 5 matched four items correctly with Player 1, Player 5 would get 40 points and Player 1 would get 16 points. At the same time, Player 1 would be adding up the points he earned from each other player for his grand total on that round.