The other evening, four of us played "Password" after dinner. It is surprising how much quiet there can be and still be having fun. You probably know the game. You and I can be partners and those two can be but we sit across from our partners, not with them. We take a small card that has a short list of words on it but it is very difficult to read the words and the game is designed that way. If you have good light, you can read the words on the card when it is inserted in a special reader that blocks out the redactions and lets each word in the list show, one at a time.
The person sitting beside me is the part of the other team. That person gets to say one word, something chosen to make the partner say the key word from the card. If the key word is "black", maybe the speaker will say "dark". In the different game called "Taboo", there is a list of words that cannot be used as a prompt but in "Password", there is no explicit list. However, a speaker is not allowed to use a proper noun, so I couldn't say "Ford" hoping you would be motivated to say "black". Nobody is going to think the key word is black if they hear Ford so I wouldn't say it anyway.
There is a limited number of tries per word and sometimes neither speaker manages to get the partner to say the key word. We had the word "gallant" the other night and all attempts failed. After we had used up all the tries, I asked for an example of gallant and was immediately told of Sir Walter Raleigh placing his (lovely? valuable?) cloak across a muddy puddle to enable the Queen to walk without getting dirty. [I just looked up the event and found that Raleigh was a court favorite but spent a surprising amount of time locked up for one thing or another in the Tower of London.] I guess he was rather gallant.
