Let’s Get Naked!

I’m a huge fan of sex games (as you can imagine, considering that I’ve invented one), but I have nowhere near the talent of some of my friends for turning any ordinary, innocent game into a stripping game.

We all know about stripping games like strip poker, of course. Or, at least, most of us do. There are a zillion variants; some versions of strip poker don’t involve betting but require the player with the worst hand to remove an item of clothing after each round, while others are more conventional betting games but the stakes you play for are your opponent’s clothes rather than money. There’s a version here that’s pretty easy even for people who aren’t poker players to follow.

Some variants of strip games also have rules that say a person who’s completely naked and who must lose clothing instead performs some act for the benefit of the other players, though other varieties say that a player who’s naked is simply out of the game, or a player who’s naked doesn’t suffer any consequences for a losing hand.

The neat thing, though, is that any game, with a bit of cleverness, can be turned into a strip game.

And not just card games. Hell, you can turn a pile of forks and a banana hook into a strip game, if you like…I’ll get to that in a minute.

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The first part of turning any game into a strip game is to define what an article of clothing is. Some folks like to leave that up to each player, though I think that can unfairly slant the game–if you get one person who says that only wearable items like shorts or socks count and another person who counts each individual earring as a separate item of clothing, things can end up unbalanced. Especially for the player who has no earrings sitting next to the player who’s got fifteen piercings in each ear.

The rules that my friends and I have standardized on are: Jewelry and items such as watches don’t count. Paired items count as one article of clothing–both shoes together are a single item, both socks together are a single item, and so on. We also play that if you’re wearing a shirt and a sweater, they both together count as a single item–no multiple layers of clothing allowed.

But then, we’re pretty hardcore about getting naked during a strip game, so take that for what it’s worth.

So to show the kind of versatility you can get with strip games, I’ll describe three games I’ve played: two commercial games (Are You a Werewolf? and Apples to Apples) and a game invented by a friend (Forks).

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Are You a Werewolf? is a party game based on an older game called Mafia. It can be played with a special deck of cards that you can buy online, or with a normal deck of cards. The full rules of the game are available here, but basically it’s a game of social manipulation in which two players are randomly assigned the role of “werewolf,” one player is randomly assigned the role “seer,” and everyone else is assigned the role “villager.” Another player is the moderator, who doesn’t actually participate except to tell the players what happens each round. The players do not know who is assigned to what role.

Each round, the players all close their eyes and make noise. The werewolves silently open their eyes and then silently choose another player to devour in the night. Then they close their eyes and the seer opens his eyes. The seer silently chooses a player, and the moderator silently tells the seer if the chosen player is a villager or werewolf. Then the entire group opens their eyes.

The moderator tells the players which one of them was devoured by the werewolves. That player is then out of the game. The players then vote on who to lynch for the crime; their goal is to lynch the werewolves, of course, but they don’t know who the werewolves are! Simple majority vote carries the day, and players can use deceit and trickery to try to influence the lynching away from themselves onto others. The seer can try to manipulate the voting, but since the seer is a prime target of the werewolves, she doesn’t want to draw attention to herself.

When a player is chosen to be lynched, that player is out of the game and that player’s role is revealed. Then a new round begins. The game continues in rounds until either both werewolves are lynched or until the werewolves eat the village.

The strip variant of Are You a Werewolf? is pretty straightforward. After each game, if the werewolves won, all the villagers lose an item of clothing. If the villagers won, all the werewolves lose an item of clothing. The fun part comes in when people begin negotiating about who to lynch based not on who they think the werewolves might be, but on who they think they might like to see get naked…

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Apples to Apples is a word-association game in which each round, one player acts as a judge and plays a card that has some adjective printed on it. The other players, who hold cards containing nouns printed on them, play one of their noun cards they think is most related to the adjective card. The player who is the judge for that round chooses which card she thinks most suits the adjective. That person gets a point, and the play continues with a new judge.

We’ve gone through several strip variants of Apples to Apples, most of which end up with everyone getting naked pretty quick. In the variant we finally came up with, each round the judge chooses the noun card that LEAST matches the adjective, and the player who played that card loses an item of clothing.

Since a person is guaranteed to lose clothing every round, and since a round takes less than a minute to play, someone usually ends up naked very quickly in the game. For that reason, we adopted a rule that says that if the player who is to lose clothing is already naked, then he chooses another player at his whim to lose an article of clothing instead. Like I said, we’re pretty hardcore about our strip games…

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Recently, at a fetish convention, I was introduced to a fun and quirky little reverse-Jenga style game called Forks, played with a metal skewer, a banana hook, and a pile of 60 or 70 forks.

The first step is to bend the metal skewer so that it has a loop in one end. The skewer gets hung on the banana hook like so:

The forks are distributed so that each player has the same number of forks in front of her.

The players take turns on each round. On each turn, the players insert one fork onto the skewer or hook, or onto forks that are already there. Forks may not be stacked and they must not touch the ground.

If a player knocks forks off the stack, or causes forks to touch the ground, then as long as 5 or fewer forks have fallen the player must place them back in the collection of forks. If more than 5 forks end up falling off or touching the ground on one turn, the player adds all those forks to his pile of forks.

The goal is to run out of forks. If more than one player runs out of forks in one round, then the players who still have forks left are out of the game. Their forks are distributed among the remaining players and play continues.

There are a couple of ways to make this a stripping game. In the fast version, any player who knocks forks off the pile immediately loses an item of clothing. In the slow version, the losers of each game lose an item of clothing.

Me being who I am, I like the fast version better.