There was a fun Internet game that I saw yesterday. What you had to do was write a short plot of a movie if that movie had been watched in reverse. For instance, the plot of Jaws would be “Man-eating shark spits people onto a beach until officials are finally forced to open it”, and the plot of Twister would be “Large whirlwind travels over destroyed areas of the central United States, fixing the damage and gently placing buildings and cows on the ground”.

Someone on that Internet site decided to start doing the same things with video games, and since that was also a success, I’m doing it with tabletop games. Below are 10 backwards plots of games that can be played without a computer. Can you figure out what all of the games are?

1. Blocks assemble themselves into the tallest tower possible, before condensing themselves into a much more stable tower one-by-one.
2. Common words and phrases are spoken, suddenly appearing on cards as phonetically similar words.
3. Several successful entrepeneurs go on a cross-country road trip, losing their children, their spouse, their investments, and their job, before becoming college drop-outs.
4. A nicely organized group of cards separates themselves; some of them go into lines of cards of various sizes, while most travel three-by-three into a much larger group.
5. The ruler of the world, with a huge force of troops in Australia, decides to slowly donate his land to several other conquerors through a series of dice rolls.
6. Two nations are in disarray. The king of one of those nations stands up, and both nations slowly assemble themselves on opposite sides of the country.
7. A small town in France gets smaller and smaller, losing its population before it disappears entirely.
8. Surgeons slowly put bones into the body a red-nosed man until he finds himself in horrible pain.
9. Four big-mouthed pachyderms sit around a table, spitting up marbles.
10. A team of people yell out random words which are then erased from pads of paper that had visual representations of those words on them.

Answers:

1. Jenga
2. Mad Gab
3. The Game of LIFE
4. Solitaire
5. Risk
6. Chess
7. Carcasonne
8. Operation
9. Hungry Hungry Hippos
10. Pictionary