Saturday, March 24, 2007

Dialogue Chicken

chickens.jpgIn Dialogue Chicken, players create dialogues based on two randomly-juxtaposed lines of dialogue.

What You Need

Many sheets of note-paper.
One pencil per player.
A four-minute timer.

Setup

Each player writes two separate lines of dialogue, one per slip of paper. Each line should begin with the name of a character, followed by something that that character says. Shuffle all the slips of paper into a face-down pile. Give each player a healthy supply of note-paper.

Generating the Prompt

At the beginning of each round, the current Judge draws two lines of dialogue from the face-down pile, and reads them aloud in either order. The Judge writes a (1) on the first paper, and a (2) on the second.

Writing the Entries

You have four minutes to write as many dialogues as you'd like which incorporate the two lines of dialogue. The two lines can appear anywhere within your dialogue, in any order. You don't have to copy the lines; simply insert a (1) or a (2) at the appropriate place.

Judging the Entries

The Judge selects one player to read all the entries aloud. After hearing them all, the Judge picks two favorites, and the respective creators receive one point each. If the same player created both of the chosen entries, that player gets both points. Use the two lines of dialogue to track the points. After each player has been the Judge once, the game ends, and the player with the most points wins.



Dialogue Chicken is a game that's an offshoot of the "Chicken Game System" designed by Kory Heath and collaborators.

There are more pencil and paper games at The Chicken Game System and a commercial version called Why Did the Chicken ...? with a bit on how to play.

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