How to Play: Build Your Own Pyramid
Pyramid is a game show where contestants get their partners to say a word as fast as possible. We’re adding some game design tech to make it a fun game you can set up quickly in any party.
Number of Players: Four or more.
Equipment: Index cards and a pen.
Rules of play:
1.) Hand seven index cards to each player. Have them write an odd word or short expression on each index card. Proper nouns are fine, but make sure that the players understand that these words should be common enough that everyone in the group probably know what they mean.
2.) Collect the cards and shuffle them face down.
3.) Split the participants into teams, and choose a team to go first.
4.) The first team picks up the stack of face down cards and is given a one minute timer. One person is the reader, and the other players on that team are the guesser(s).
5.) When the timer starts, the reader flips over the first card. The reader’s job is to explain what the word(s) on the card say without saying any of the words on the card. For example, if the words say “The Fourth of July”, they may say “It’s a patriotic holiday with fireworks.” They can’t say the word ‘Fourth’ or ‘July’, though.
6.) If at any time the guesser is stumped, they may put the card they are looking at on the bottom of the pile and take a new card. If you think players might try to take advantage of this rule to read through all the cards, you can enforce a three second minimum pause between passes.
7.) If the guesser(s) say the word(s), they score a point, set the word aside, and the reader looks at the next word. They continue doing this until their timer runs out. Any additional words the reader looked at, but which wasn’t successfully guessed is put on the bottom of the stack.
8.) When time is up, pass the stack to the next team, who tries to score as many points as they can before time is up.
9.) When the stack is empty, the speed round begins. Shuffle all the words together and play the game again, but this time everyone already knows what all the words are in the stack. This time around, set the timer to 30 seconds.
10.) Rearrange the order of the teams so that the players with the least points get the stack of cards first, the players with the second to least points goes second, etc. until the players in the lead go last. Give the stack of cards to the players in last place, set the timer, and go.
11.) When the stack is exhausted a second time, the team with the most points wins.
