Carnelli

The goal of party games is connection. 

This evening, my family played Carnelli. It’s an association game: one person names a publication (movie, show, song, album, book, speech), and the next person names one that connects to it. Connections are legal across shared words, shared artists, or puns. Even if you’ve never heard of Moon River, you can take it to Moondance (via moon), or to Stand By Me (via River, through the actor River Phoenix).

It’s my favorite party game in a while. (Second only to Person Do Thing, which demands more focus and wants a big screen.) You get three things at once: you learn what media each other knows, you connect over shared interests and experiences, and you sing little songs together.

We started rocky. People took a while to make connections; the connections weren’t clean. But there’s a moment when a game clicks.

That click is clearest in The Mind, a silent card game where the goal is to play the next card in sequence without communicating. But it happens in every game. It’s what my father calls “having a rhythm.” It’s the sync-ness everyone feels. It’s the reason we play together.