litza and ari had a small group of friends over for new year's eve, and we ended up having a lot of fun. much of the day litza had her bread maker cooking up dough to use with making our own pizzas for dinner.

the pizzas were a big hit, and not nearly as hard as i would have imagined them to be. plus it was fun for some of us to take a turn making on and then having everyone enjoy it after a few minutes later.

luckily i put no stock in this kind of stuff at all, for entertainment purposes only, that's what i say. after hanging out chatting with everyone for a while the party started taking somewhat of a dip in energy, so we decided to play some games, which quickly picked things up.

i saw it as an excellent opportunity to play one of my all-time favorite games, mafia. we played about three rounds of that, the last of which led us right up into the new year's countdown. chris masterfully deceived me into believing that he was innocent and i voted with him against the last remaining player, securing the win for him. i'll remember that for next time we play, however...

after that we tried another game that at first didn't work so well but as the night went on got better and better. in the psychiatrist game, one player is deemed the psychiatrist and must leave the room. the remaining players must agree on an affliction or shared characteristic that the psychiatrist must then attempt to reveal by asking only yes/no questions. it took us all a while to get the hang of it, both in asking questions and in choosing afflictions which were neither impossible to guess nor too easy. we did better after allowing there to be two psychiatrists working together to discuss theories on what the solution might be. most of the fun afflictions we came up with had nothing to do with medical diagnoses, but rather simple rules on how to answer questions. for example, when i was guessing, everyone would answer my questions according to this rule, if the question includes your name, say yes. if not, say no. it sounds easy but believe me it was so difficult to get to the bottom of it. my partner and i needed a bit of hint before it finally clicked as to what it was.

others included everyone conforming their answers to whatever chris said. so he was the only one answering honestly, and if he answered the last question yes, we would all in turn continue to answer yes to whatever was asked of us until he had answered another question no. probably the most fun we had all night though was the idea someone had that we could answer honestly, but that we had to touch our head or face while answering. everyone would touch their chin as to pretend they were thinking or scratch their head while answering, and it really got hilarious. meanwhile, the poor people trying to guess what we were doing were analyzing the content of our answers to death while that had actually nothing to do with what they needed to guess. it was a lot of fun, i'm looking forward to getting a chance to play that game again someday.

tagged: games homemade new year's eve party pizza tarot