Games Night

When our families get together around the holidays, there's often time for games. So it was this past Thanksgiving. My favorite is Beyond Balderdash, a game where your skill at creating credible lies puts you ahead. For example, the Balderdash clue might be "February 1st, 1953." You have to make up some notable event that happened on that date.

All the participants answers are collected, each one is read, then each players tries to guess the correct answer which is included among the cock 'n bull responses.

So on February 1st, 1953:

--Jake "Raging Bull" Lamotta lost his middleweight boxing championship to Sugar Ray Robinson.
--Nikita Kruschev took over the Communist Party from Stalin.
--Japanese television started broadcasting
--Bill Haley's Rock Around The Clock hit number one on the Billboard charts.
--The first roller rink opened in New York City.
--Elvis Presley produced his first record.
--The first autombile powered by an engine was invented.

So the answers above are wrong except for one. Students of history should be able to logically eliminate a few. But one answer kinda stands out. The engine-powered automobile was developed long before 1953. So since it was my turn to be reader, I thought I would help out my young nephew Mike who created that response.

I read, "The first automobile powered by a jet engine was invented."

After I read all the answers, my nephew said, "I didn't hear mine."

I couldn't let on what I had done lest I reveal his answer. So I read them all again.

"It sounds like a word was added to my answer," my nephew said.

I was just trying to help! That's what I wanted to say. But I couldn't. And Mike couldn't say what he thought his answer really was, lest he reveal it himself. In another Balderdash game, my brother mis-read mouse-like to be moose-like, so one definition of the clue word became a "a moose-like animal that lives in South America." The person who created that answer had to bite his lip as other players laughed at the idea of a moose gallumping through the rainforests.

Anyway, among the answers above, nobody voted for the correct answer, which was the introduction of Japanese television. And nobody voted for my nephew's answer either.

"Can anybody reading my answers not add any words to them anymore," my nephew asked.

No problem.