Salad Bowl

The Feinland family arrived yesterday evening sometime after 8:30p.m. They had driven up from Salt Lake City- a 4 to 4 1/2 hour drive. We talked a while, but soon it was after midnight for them, so we headed to bed. We slept ten in the house, no problem. Breakfast was pretty much each person on their own with lots of options: oatmeal, cereal, eggs, smoothies, muffins, toast, fruit, etc. No one opted for pancakes. 

After breakfast and cleanup, we played "Salad Bowl," a game the Feinlands introduced us to. Each person writes a word or phrase on five slips of paper. The slips are folded and put in a big bowl. Players form two teams; in our case it was girls against boys. There are three rounds. In the first round, the first one up draws a slip from the bowl, reads it, and tries to describe the word or phrase in such a way that their team will say the word. They can say anything except the word itself. E.g,, if the word was "apple," they could say it was a red fruit you take a bite out of, a computer, etc . When someone on the team says the word, the player throws the slip on the floor and draws out another. The player has one minute to do this as many times as they can. Play alternates between teams, in a pre-determined order of players, until all the slips have been identified. A player has the option of passing on a slip - it is set aside and goes back in the bowl. That constitutes the first round. Each team adds up and records the slips identified by their team. All slips then go back in the bowl. Round two is like charades. Play resumes where it ended in round one (if the last player only got part of their minute in round one, they get the remainder in round two ). The player draws a slip, and this time, they have two minutes to act out as many words or phrases they can get their team to identify as they can . These are the same words and phrases as used in round one so everyone has just heard them. This speeds up the identification. E.g.,  Ellen went through 7-8 slips in two minutes. The teams tally up and move on to round three. This time, a player can say only one word. If the team can't identify quickly, that slip is set aside and goes back in the bowl for the next player. The hard ones thus get left to last. The team with the highest cumulative score wins. It's a fun game and moves right along!