The New Ungame

Did anyone else have parents that pulled out The Ungame for Family Nights?  I'm quite sure The Ungame was my mom's favorite game.  In fact, she would probably still pull it out at family gatherings if she could be sure we wouldn't all tease her.  (Maybe she just has the questions memorized and sneaks them casually into conversation. ;))

Anyway, if you've not heard of The Ungame, it was a game created in the 70's that consists of cards with questions on them like: "If you could choose to be any type of tree, what type would you choose to be, and why?" 

Not really.  

I totally made that question up. 

Fast-forward to our family vacation in August.  We were going to be spending 5 hours in the van each way, so rather than just rely on the individual snack bags I'd packed for them and our standby games (the ever-popular slug-bug game, ABC game and the license plate game), I came up with some road-trip activities.  I made little travel books for each of the kids, with pages and pages of games.   In my search for games to fill our book, I stumbled upon some great questions, here (from a mom who wanted some conversation starters for their dinnertime), and here.  I used some (not all) of their questions, and made up some of my own.   Then I cut them into strips and put them all into a plastic jar with a lid, and we took the jar with us on vacation.

Every so often I'd pull out the jar and pass it around and everyone would pull out a question.

Silly questions like:

-Would you rather wear your shoes on the wrong feet or wear your pants backward?

-If snow could fall in any flavor, what flavor would you choose?

And more thoughtful questions like: 

-If you could be an Olympic athlete, in what sport would you compete?

-If you could jump into any book and be a character in it, which book would you choose and why?

-If you could travel back to a specific moment in history, what would it be?

-If you could invent something that would make life easier, what would it do?

Maybe it's just my kids, but they LOVED those questions.  They always wanted to answer each others' questions and then pass the jar around again to draw another question.  We still had leftover questions when we got back home, so I just shelved the jar.  Last night after dinner was over, I asked a random question for everyone to answer and they were all asking for another question.  It was then that I remembered our jar, so I scurried off to get it, and we passed it around the table.

It occurred to me then that our little jar of questions is pretty much the The New Ungame. :)  Oh well.