There are two delightful games we have been playing in our family during the last few years. Both are very entertaining, but also very intellectual. Usually our moms, my sister, Aunt Bea (the sister of Mommy Jean), and, in case they visit us, Uncle Frank and Uncle Guido (the brothers of Mommy Friede) participate in them. The mother and sister of Mommy Friede are unfortunately not fond of playing games at all.

The first one we call “The Know-All”. One player picks a random entry from Wikipedia; if he does not like it he picks another. It can be some strange word or the name of a person. He then tells everybody what he picked but without the explanation. He then writes the explanation on a piece of paper from a notepad and puts it into a cloth bag. The other players make up fanciful explanations for the entry which they also write down and put into the bag.

Example given: James Venture Mulligan. Correct explanation: Ireland-born Australian prospector and explorer. False explanations: British 19^th-century horror author whose most famous work was the Gothic novel “The Second Doppelganger”, American inventor of the escalator, British 20th-century historian best known for his studies of ancient Egypt.

The player who chose the entry then reaches into the bag and pulls out one explanation after the other, reading it out loud to the other players. These other players then have to guess which explanation is the right one. Every player who guesses right gets a point. For every player whose wrong explanation is chosen both the player who chose the Wikipedia entry and the player who wrote the false explanation gets a point. If no-one guesses correctly the player who chose the entry gets an extra point.

The game ends when all players have picked an entry. The winner is of course the player with the most points.

The other game is called “The Mad Scientist”. One player comes up with a weird hypothesis in any science - physics, geology, history, literary studies, fine arts, whatever. The other players are fellow scientists who refute the hypothesis. Examples given: The Swiss are descendants of the Aztecs, electrons have a brain, human beings are not most closely related to monkeys but to elephants, the Mona Lisa was not painted by Leonardo da Vinci but by Michelangelo.

The mad scientist then has to try to convince the other scientists of his hypothesis. The other players are allowed to come up with objections which the mad scientist then has to refute somehow. He has ten minutes for this attempt to convict the others. After each player has been the mad scientist once the players then vote who most convincingly defended his mad hypothesis. If there is a tie the players who were voted for have another five minutes to defend their hypothesis. This continues until one player finally wins.

Both games are a lot of fun and have often caused roars of laughter.

Do any others of you play similar games?

can't say me or Raff play such similar games.. the games we play... oh never mind...  are decidedly unintellectual haha.  In my free time I play military strategy board games which Raff has as much interest as I have (these days at least) of putting on a dress and trying to score young horny proggers in desperate need of a woman.

Life and the job are tough enough on the brain.. . home is a place to relax and turn off the brain.

Much simpler than the two you mentioned, there's one we used to play with our 3 children (generally while on vacation with the camper, during the long nights of Mediterranean summer) - asking trivial stupid questions around the table, one at the time,  for example:

one asks "what's the third most annoying thing can happen in your daily life ?" and the answers can  be very surprising and anecdotal, everybody has a good laugh

and on goes the next "In which order do you wash your body parts while showering, and why so ?"

and it can go on until imagination runs out.

The next day one of the kids would come up with a new challenge "I've been thinking of a couple crazy  questions, let me throw them at you tonight" and everyone started preparing their own, the weirder the better.

The first one sounds similar to a marketed game, whose name I unfortunately can't remember right now. I'm not sure I'd enjoy the second one. :p 

We have played this game too, not with poems but with stories. The stories that are created this way are pretty weird, but some faulty grammar usually has to be corrected. I remember one very funny result. Someone finished a sentence in his turn and started a new one with the words "Beethoven was deaf", with "deaf" being the word carried over to the next line. The sentence was continued with "dumb and blind, but he did not mind at all". I really had to laugh at that one.

It certainly is a very funny game. But I don't think it resembles the game Alice describes in her post at all.

with all luck you both will inherit that wierdness and coolness.  Funny how we can tend to mirror our parents as we become adults.  My parents were very different, one a leftist flower child another a right wing Vietnam vet.  Didn't make for happy or long lasted marriage of course haha but it did make for a great education as child of theirs. Looking at myself I can really see how I inherited parts of them