A while ago I created a board game called Connectix. The goal of the game is to connect three seemingly random words written on a card. These connections can be quite far-fetched, an example would be:
finger gun eye
The players see only the three words on a card. One player picks up the card and either knows the connection and explains it, or he bluffs and tells a random story he made up (“the forefinger was called gun-finger and eye-finger in the past”). The other players than vote if they believe the story or not.
The player gets points based on the amount of votes: if he lied he gets as much points as there were people who believed him. If he told the truth, he gets as much points as people that thought it was a lie.
So the game consists of luck (the cards you get), knowledge and creativity. Too bad it apparently was too difficult to play :D
Solution: Bond-movie titles with the word 'gold' in it: Goldfinger, the Man with the Golden Gun and Goldeneye.
With each card there was an extra bit of trivia attached, to keep it a bit light-weight. In our example:
Goldeneye was the first bond movie not based on a story by Ian Fleming, but the title was based on Ian Fleming's life: it's the name of his summerhouse.
Resurrection on Facebook 🔗
So the board-game didn’t completely work out. But that doesn’t mean the game is over!
I have resurrected the game on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/connectix/
The ‘bluff’ element has been taken out (because impossible on Facebook) and the riddles have become a bit more difficult (because Google…)
update july 2018: apparently there is a scientific interest in this idea, there’s even a test (Remote Associates Test, the RAT) to measure combinatory thinking. Developed by Sawyer in 2013. Here’s an article in English using Dutch words and here’s the article I found this reference.