I recently took a trip to prestigious Indianapolis, Indiana. There may be a lot of you who have never heard of this place. You might not get out a lot or are otherwise fairly un-knowledgeable about North American geography. But rest assured I can make it plain for you. Indianapolis, or “Indy” as locals call it, is the state capital of Indiana, a state founded on December 11, 1816. I haven’t ever lived there, but I know a thing or two from my independent readings.

Anyhow, our family was on vacation and we were playing games at night, as one tends to do. There are a plethora of great new games available on the market now. Games like Monopoly, Connect Four, Candyland and Chutes and Ladders. If you get a chance, you should definitely try some of these games for yourself.

A member of our group suggested we play the word game Scattergories. Now, I’m sure I’ve lost you by mentioning this, so I’ll take a brief section here to explain what this game is all about:

I’ve alluded to this before, but I’ll remind you again that I have a photographic memory. In fact I once took an IQ test and was found to be in the 98th percentile for men aged forty to fifty, which is generally considered to be the most competitive category for overall IQ, as most of the world’s smartest men and biggest contributors to society and the world are in their prime during this age.

So with Scattergories, rather than copy and pasting a brief description straight from their Wikipedia page, let me tell you from my memory that Scattergories is a creative-thinking category-based party game originally published by Milton Bradley in 1988. The objective of the 2-to-6-player game is to score points by uniquely naming objects, people, actions, and so forth within a set of categories, given an initial letter, within a time limit.

We passed the evening together playing this game in a pleasant enough manner. As a dedicated father and husband it gives me great satisfaction to engage in activities that even the playing field for members of my family who don’t possess a superior intellect like mine. By the way, genius such as mine is a great blessing, but also can feel like a terribly heavy responsibility. Therefore, felicitous games with family are an important respite for me as well.

Obviously, for the sake of fairness I held the full power of my mind in check during the duration of Scattergories and even let my wife and kids win a few rounds. As a father, I want to instill a spirit of confidence in my children and some early experiences of success, whether they be real or not, are essential for bolstering the child’s inner spirit. This I’ve garnered from my extensive readings in the classics of child psychology.

I did not dislike Scattergories per se, but throughout the course of the game an idea for a different passtime began to germinate within me. A vision for wordplay in which the cognitively elite and those with a heavy intellectual endowment such as mine can verbally duel for recreational purposes. The game I imagined is called ‘Last Man Splaining’. It begins by pulling out the game instructions and reading through them. Each man goes around the circle taking turns explaining the game in a patronizing manner. Any man who cannot keep up this lengthy explanation is Out and considered by the others to be their inferior. On and on the game goes, each man striving to find the mot juste to capture the game creator’s original intent, while the other participants in the room (mostly wives and children) are coolly tolerant, thinking to themselves, “Duh! We KNOW the rules, we’ve played this game a thousand times!!!”