In Limerick Chicken, players are presented with rhymes and must use them to create limericks.
What You Need
- Many sheets of note-paper.
- One pencil per player.
- A five-minute timer.
Setup
Each player writes down two “rhyme-words”, one per piece of note-paper. Your two words shouldn’t rhyme with each other, but they should both be words that have lots of rhymes. Shuffle all the rhyme-words into a face-down pile, and give each player a healthy supply of blank note-paper.
Generating the Prompt
At the beginning of each round, the current Judge draws two rhyme-words and displays them for all to see.
Writing the Entries
You now have five minutes to write as many limericks as you can using these two rhymes. (You don’t have to use the words themselves, although you may.) You may choose which rhyme to use as the “A” rhyme, and which as the “B” rhyme. Write each limerick on a separate piece of paper. When the timer runs out, you’re allowed to finish the one you’re working on, but you aren’t allowed to start another one. Shuffle everyone’s entries into a face-down pile.
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 rhyme-words to track the points. After each player has been the Judge once, the game ends, and the player with the most points wins.
Acknowledgments
- Game Design—Chris Welsh
- Playtesting—John Cooper, Gina Mai Denn, Kory Heath, Jenny Lynch