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11 Saturday - August 1973
223rd day - 142 days to come

Rcd. [received] a letter from Graeme Levin. Mentions S&T, G&P, EXECUTIVE DECISION, SLEUTH, PLOY, AGOG, SIGMA FILE, GAMES WITH PENCIL AND PAPER.
Prepared a list of games that I could review in answer to Graeme's suggestion that I prepare such a list:- KGB, BILLIONAIRE, GRAPPLE, BOGGLE, FLUSTER, WATERWORKS, PLOY, FEUDAL, IMAGE, SLEUTH, EXECUTIVE DECISION, VENTURE, MONAD, CAR-TEL, REALM, INFINITY, MONTAGE, MYWORD!, BRIDGETTE, TRAP, WATERGATE SCANDAL, TRIPPPLES, STAY ALIVE, OUTDOOR SURVIVAL.

Brought a copy of REALM to George Bredehorn. Played it a lot with Stan Chess. Discovered that from the standard opening the first player has to win unless he makes a mistake. Even in the variation with different starting layouts, the first player can almost always win.
George had a game he devised to teach his students grammar. It is called A THOUSAND LAUGHS. There are a list of 10 subjects of a sentence, a list of ten first parts of a predicate, and a list of ten seconds parts of a sentence. Each separate member of each list is printed on a card. One player (the teacher) takes one card from each list, setting up a secret sentence. There are a set of "question" cards with questions such as "Is the subject compound?", "Are there more than seven words in the two parts of the predicate?", etc. Each contestant (student) draws a card and the teacher answers the question. Some cards allow the student to make up his own question. After the question is answered, the student says a sentence made up from one entry from each list. The teacher tells the student whether none of the sentence is correct, whether part is - but not specifying the part of parts, or is the entire sentence is correct - in which case the student wins. I beat Stan.
George also had a question wheel. In a window a question appears with 3 possible answers. There are buttons next to each answer and if the correct one is pushed a light lights. This is accomplished very simply by having a hole punched in right line with the button at the right answer. The paper disc, on which the questions are printed, serves as an insulator to stop the circuit for the wrong answers.

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