Among other things, while in Chichester I was forcibly introduced to Country, county, town — a word game which, I’ve discovered, opens up many new word games.

The name has long put me off, as it evokes geography, geography and geography, none of which I enjoyed at school. The rules go like this:

A group of you pick about twenty categories: country, county, town, book, animal, car model, fruit, etc. Next someone picks a letter at random (eg “The first letter on the page of this book that I’m going to open at random”). Then each person privately writes down one thing from each of those categories, which must begin with the chosen letter. So for T you might have Turkey, Tyrone, Telford, Tamburlaine Must Die, etc. At some point (usually when someone admits to having completed every category, or by mutual consent) everyone stops and you compare answers. Two points for an original answer, one point for something which at least one other person got.

Despite my misgivings this was actually good fun, including the unbelievably stupid arguments (”A spider isn’t an animal, it’s an insect”).

Also, it made me see a whole new family of word games. Here’s a grid for Country, county town:

          A     B     C    ...
Country  ...   ...   ...   ...
County   ...   ...   ...   ...
Town     ...   ...   ...   ...
Book     ...   ...   ...   ...


It’s effectively a map of the game. (Obviously it goes further down and across.)

(There’s a slight diversion here. You could easily “revise” for the game by filling in your own grid beforehand and swotting up on it. You might miss a few categories, but you’ll get a head start on your opponents and you’ll certainly get better over time.)

Now one round of Country, county, town simply involves filling in one column of this grid.

But suddenly there are a few other word games we can make up. As a child I would play Tell me. This involved spinning a letter wheel, picking a card (”Name an animal”) and the answer had to begin with the chosen letter. The game effectively uses the same grid, but jumps from cell to cell, randomly.

Another game involves picking a category (”Name an animal”) then giving one answer for each letter of the alphabet. This is running through the grid in rows, rather than the columns of the Country, county, town game.

Or you could combine rows and columns. Start with a category and a letter, and one person has to give an answer. Then they change the category (but keep the letter) which the next person has to answer. That person changes the letter (but keeps the category) for the next one. And so on. This is a bit like a staircase effect on the grid.

I’m having as much fun making up games as playing them. I’m wondering if you could map other simple games — Trivial Pursuit? Mastermind? Consequences? — and come up with yet more games by navigating the map in different ways.

Tags: wordgames, games, countrycountytown