Awesome party games: pancakes or waffles

What's that? You like waffles? Well, THEY'RE GONE FOREVER!

There’s a party game I’ve been aware of for several years now, and it deserves to be shared. First of all, it’s not strictly a party game - it can be played with as little as three or four people and can be played anywhere and any time you’re craving an interesting, thoughtful, often hilarious conversation. It’s not limited to twenty-somethings by any means, but our demographic does have a particular penchant for getting together and hanging out while sipping on some brewskies and waxing philosophical. And Pancakes or Waffles is the perfect game for that.

So. You start with the question “pancakes or waffles?” and everyone participating must vote on which they prefer. Pancakes will obviously win (you can see that the debating will begin immediately). This means that we have effectively eliminated waffles from the existing world as we know it. No more waffles. Ever. They no longer exist.

Now someone proposes the next question: “pancakes or _______?” where the second item in question should be something the person deems slightly better than pancakes, and this is not limited to food. So let’s say the question proposed is “pancakes or slippers?” Slippers would, I’m guessing, win that round. The next person proposes another question involving slippers versus something else, and so on, and things continue to be eliminated from the world.

Things get really interesting once you progress a few rounds. The other day when I played, “sandwiches” survived several rounds, eliminating Disney movies, cursing, and sandals. We eventually had to jump to airplanes, just to get sandwiches out. Airplanes went on to beat extended family in an extremely difficult and guilt-inducing decision (Sincere apologies to the extended family that I know reads this. I don’t know what to say, except that I’m so glad you exist). I can’t quite remember what happened in the subsequent rounds, but towards the end of the game music beat higher education. And then we stopped playing because we got distracted by the gorgeous view of Mt. Hood through the trees (more on this and our hiking adventure later!).

As you can imagine, it can get pretty heated, and it often comes down to one vote. To give some more examples from a different but also recent game I played: socks beat out many things, including the beach (to Dolores’ absolute dismay). Urban parks eventually beat socks and then stuck around for a while. Then came the question “urban parks or buttons?” It was clarified that “buttons” referred to all kinds of buttons that you press (not just the kind on clothes). Which led to a discussion about how we’d have to go back to rotary phones, since you couldn’t have buttons for numbers. And other buttons like on a microwave or TV remote would have to be replaced by switches and dials, or perhaps everything would just go a touch screen system, at which point we realized that the letters on keyboards were buttons and Wanda (you remember Wanda with the metal femur?) astutely suggested that we create a Ouija board keyboard to compensate. And then would we have belly levers instead of belly buttons? Urban parks won that round, mostly because more than half of us wanted to see a world full of switches, dials, belly levers, and Ouija board keyboards.

I’ve played games of Pancakes or Waffles where we had to choose between nature and siblings (Big bro or trees? It’s tough!),* where we had to eliminate saturated fats and the ability to move your spinal column, where it all came down to “friendship or hope?” and my one friend insisted that nothing whatsoever could trump hope, even friendship (he’s clearly not my friend anymore, that jerk). “Cheese or oral sex?” almost always comes up for some reason, with cheese winning, I would say, the majority of the time. The other night we had an intense debate over “music or running?” - you have to consider that taking out running takes out most sports, too, and we had already eliminated bicycles and mountains (so downhill skiing is out), so how are we suppose to exercise??** Then again, music is music. And if you vote for running over music, then you can’t listen to your ipod when you’re running anyway, so - but then again, there are always podcasts. So you see how deep it gets.

The downside of the game is that it gets pretty depressing towards the end, when there’s almost nothing left in the world. At the culmination of the most recent game, we had eliminated hair, eyelids, stars, sleeping in the dark (it was stipulated that whenever you slept, the lights had to be at a certain level), clothes, writing, and speech. We were basically a bunch of naked mole people who couldn’t communicate and had to wear goggles to keep things out of our eyes.*** We finally decided to end the game when we got to “being able to touch other people.” At that point we felt we had sufficiently met the goals of the game. And the thought of touching other eyelid-less, hairless people who can only grunt to express themselves was fairly nauseating.

The upside of the game is that when you’re done, you’re SO EXCITED about the fact that we still have underwear! and ice cream! and fingernails! and domesticated animals! and dancing! and sarcasm! and water! and the ability to think critically! and blogs!

Play the game. It’s fun. Report back.

Loving life,
Your Portland Twenty-something

*Totally kidding, big bro. Totally kidding. Not to mention that eliminating siblings eliminates aunts, uncles, and cousins, too, so the big family gathering is essentially wiped out, and just think about what that would mean for Thanksgiving. Of course, we did choose airplanes over extended family last weekend, but we decided then that our extended family wouldn’t cease to exist, it just meant that we wouldn’t be able to contact them or ever see them again. Which made it easier to justify choosing airplanes. The not-actually-killing-them-off, I mean.
**I suppose there’s always rollerblading. Good ol’ rollerblading.
***AND we had gotten rid of sunglasses! Can you imagine! And having to sleep with the lights on and not being able to close your eyes for lack of eyelids! So I suggested that we would have to wear goggles with eyepatches over them as sort of makeshift sunglasses. Which is a fabulous idea.