All the players stand in a circle, facing one another, but looking down at their feet.

When the leader says “now”, everyone looks up and at someone else’s eyes. If they make direct eye contact with someone (i.e. person A is looking straight and person B, and person B is looking straight at person A), both people SCRREEEAAAAMMMMM, and then sit down.

All the remaining players look back down at their feet, and the game continues until only 2 people are left.

Gets the adrenalin pumping! 🙂

You need probably at least 6 players for this game, but this really is a case of the more the merrier.

Nominate one player to be the “detective”, and send him/her out of the room.

When the “detective” has gone, choose one of the remaining players to be the “murderer”. The murderer and all the remaining players then sit in a large circle facing each other.

The “detective” is called back in, and stands in the centre of the circle.

The “murderer” now has to “kill” off all the other players by winking at them. The “detective” has to try and work out which of the players is the murderer before all the other players are murdered. The other players are not allowed to give the game away to the “detective”, and usually “die” in a highly dramatic and noisy fashion!

A less blood-thirsty variation is to nominate a “leader” instead of a “murderer”, who performs certain actions that the rest of the group must follow. The “detective” has to work out who the leader is. Good actions are clapping, stamping feet, waving, slapping knees, etc (i.e. the whole group is clapping, and suddenly switch to stamping their feet).

Another mad game that’s fairly pointless, but lots of fun and breaks the ice. There are no real winners and losers – it just runs on until everyone’s had enough!

You need a large-ish hall for us, and probably at least 8 players.

Put out two less chairs than there are players, scattering them around randomly so that they are all slightly further than touching distance away (that is, if you sit on a chair and stretch out your arms, you wouldn’t quite touch someone else doing the same thing in another chair). The aim is to create a sort of “maze” that can be dodged around by the two people who will be running around. This doesn’t matter too much, but there does need to be enough space to move between the chairs, but not so much it’s easy to run between them.

Pick two players, one is the “cat”, the other is the “mouse”. The game starts like normal “it”. The “cat” chases the mouse in and out of the chairs, and tries to touch him/her. If the “cat” manages it, the roles swap, and the “mouse” is now the “cat” and the “cat” is the “mouse.”

The fun bit is that the “mouse” can, at any point, touch the shoulder of someone who is sitting down. The person sitting down must then stand up, and becomes the “cat”, while the old “cat” now becomes the mouse!

There are a couple of variations. Firstly, the “cat” and “mouse” don’t have to swap when the “mouse” sits down – the person who stands up can become the “mouse” instead.

Secondly, you can have them lying on the floor instead of sitting in chairs, and the “mouse” must lie down beside them to switch to a new “mouse”. I’ve also heard of this done where they lie down in pairs, and the “mouse” lies down to make them three in a row, and the person ‘opposite’ the “mouse” in the threesome becomes the new “cat”.

Very simple and fun game. You need a couple of balloons, and one chair per player.

Split the players into two teams, and set up two rows of chairs – facing one another – so that chairs are about 1m apart. Get the players to sit in the chairs so that the two teams are facing each other.

The aim of the game is to try and to hit the balloon over the opposing team’s heads, so that it lands on the floor behind them. Players must remain fully seated in the chairs with both feet on the ground (and all 4 chair legs on the ground) at all times.

Start off with one balloon – The referee stands at one end of the rows, and throws it into the air between the two chairs. Each time a balloon hits the floor behind a team, it is one point. The referee then picks it up, and throws it between the chairs again from the end of the row. As the game progresses, feel free to introduce more balloons into the mix.

Standing up, tilting the chair, or kicking the balloon is an automatic penalty, with a point awarded to the other team.

The team with the most points at the end wins!

Really simple, and lots of fun. The aim of the game is to make the other people smile!

The group sit in a circle, one person is “it”.

The “it” person goes around the group in turn, saying:

Honey, if you love me, just give me a smile.

To which his target responds:

Honey, you know I love you, but I just can’t smile.

If the target manages to say this without smiling, the person who is “it” moves on. If the target does smile, they become “it”, and the person who was “it” sits down in their place.

The person who is “it” is allowed to do almost anything to try and make the person smile (funny faces, silly actions, etc), but it is good to establish rules for what physical contact, if any, is allowed. The target also has to maintain eye-contact while saying their line.

You need between 9 and 16 players, and ideally a multiple of 4. The idea of the game is to get all your team next to each other in the circle.

Setup

First if all, write the numbers 1,2,3,.. etc on pieces of paper, so that you have one piece for each player. So, if you have 12 players, you will have 12 pieces of paper, the first with “1”, the second with “2”, etc, all the way up to 12. Now fold them up.

Arrange the players in a circle of chairs facing inwards, with one extra chair. Go around the group and assign teams, so that each team has 3 or 4 players, and so no two players sitting next to each other are in the same team. E.g. for twelve players go “A”,”B”,”C”,”A”,”B”,”C”,”A”,”B”,”C”,”A”,”B”,”C”.

Get all the “A”s to stand up, and make sure they all know who they’re team members are. Likewise the other groups.

Finally, hand out the folded pieces of paper, one per player, and ask them to look at it, but they mustn’t show anyone else.

Playing

The player who is to the right of the empty chair calls out a number (from 1 to 12 in our example). The player who was given that number at the start of the game must move and sit in the empty chair.

The player who is now to the right of the newly empty chair then calls out a number, and whoever was given that number now moves to the newly empty chair. And so on.

The game is over when a team manages to get all 3 or 4 of its members sitting next to each other in a row.

I’ve found that you can play this two or three times in an evening before it gets tired. The teams can stay the same, but collect in all the pieces of paper and re-allocate numbers between rounds.

The Rules

1. The person who has just moved cannot be moved again on the next turn. (i.e. “One” immediately followed by “One” is not allowed).
2. You are not allowed to call out your own number to move yourself.
3. You are not allowed to confer or communicate (unless you can’t remember who was in your team)

Variations

This game is lots of fun if you use the names of players instead of numbers on the pieces of paper. So if you had Rod, Jane, and Freddy, you might call out “Freddy”, and Jane would move to sit next to you!!

You can also replace 3 (or 4, if your teams have 4 members) of the chairs with a sofa, or comfy chairs. The winning team is the one that manages to get all its members onto the “sofa”. Warning – this version takes a lot longer to play, and certainly younger players may lose interest.

Nominate a “splat-er”. All the other players stand in a circle around the “splat-er”. The “splat-er” stands in the middle with his/her fingers pointed upwards like a gun. He/she then slowly turns around on the spot, until he/she suddenly points their fingers towards one of the players, as if he/she was shooting them, and says “SPLAT.”

Immediately, the person who has “splatted” has to drop to the ground (to dodge the splat), and the two people either side have to ‘shoot’ each other (i.e. over the dropped persons head) with their fingers and say “SPLAT.”

• If the person dropping to floor doesn’t do so before the people either side go “splat”, he or she is out.
• Otherwise whoever was the first to be splatted of the two either side of them are out.
• If the two either side “splat” at exactly the same time, both can stay in.

The game continues in this way until only two players are left.

At this point the following happens:

1. The two remaining players stand back to back, with fingers making guns (as if they were having a duel with pistols).
2. The “splat-er” calls out a vegetable (e.g. “carrot”), and the players take one step apart.
3. The “splat-er” calls out another vegetable (e.g. “potato”), and the players take another step away from one another.
4. This continues until the “splat-er” decides to call out a fruit (e.g. “apple”), at which point the players have to spin round and “SPLAT” the other player. The person to do so first wins.

There is always a joker who calls out “tomato” – this should be banned before the splat duel starts! Similarly, continuing to call vegetables ad nauseam is to discouraged.

This game is completely random. You need at least 8 players, really.

Setup

1. Count the number of players, and work out how many groups are need so that there are 3-5 players in each group.
2. Choose a fruit for each group: e.g. with 10 players, you might have 3 groups; “bananas”, “apples”, and “grapes” (or whatever).
3. All the players sit on chairs in a circle
4. Allocate each player to a fruit group in turn. i.e. “banana”, “apple”, “grape”, “banana”, “apple”, and so on, going round the group.
5. Get each group to stand up in turn, to make sure they know which fruit they are.
6. Choose a “caller”

So now the game begins.

1. The caller calls out a fruit. Say “Banana”.
2. Every banana has to stand up, and swap places with another banana as quickly as possible.
3. The caller then calls out another fruit (or perhaps the same one again).
4. Alternatively the caller can shout “fruit salad” – everyone stands up, runs and madly screaming, and sits down again.

As far as I can tell there is no point to this game, but it’s always a big hit with the youth!

Very simple game. You need at least 4 players (but more is better), and a large open space (indoor or out).

1. Every player stands up.
2. Every player secretly and randomly chooses 2 other players from the group.
3. On “Go”, each player has to try and form an equilateral triangle with the two people they have chosen.
4. The game is over when either nobody has to move anymore, or a predetermined time limit has passed.

An alternative way of expressing “equilateral triangle” is “move to you are the same distance from both the people you have chosen, as they are from each other”.

More fun then it sounds, and good for several rounds.

My thanks to Roger for suggesting this, even if it was in a different context.

I was very brave last night – I flashed my router with a firmware I’d hexedited!

I’ve got a Buffalo WYR-G54, which was very cheap, but has essentially does the job of connecting me to the Internet with wireless to boot. One of it’s big plusses is that it routes the external IP from inside, so if I try to connect to my address from the ISP, the router will forward it to using whatever port forwarding I’ve set up. So if I’ve forwarded port 80 to 192.168.2.1:80 I’m on 192.168.2.3, and try to connect to 80.1.2.3:80 (assuming that was my IP, which it’s not), it will connect through to 192.1687.2.1:80.

On the other hand, it’s not actually very good. In particular the wireless is shockingly unstable. The Wii can only get a connection for 30 seconds or so at a time, and the laptop is better, but only actually in the same room!

The last straw was when, quite bizarrely, my windows box stopped being able to connect to the net through it, while Linux was going as fast as ever. After the usual cable and driver troubleshooting, it seemed to me that rebooting the Buffalo caused the problems to go away for a bit.

I’m still not convinced it’s not my little switch that both the Linux and XP box are plugged into…

Anyway, I decided it was time to try and hunt down a new firmware again, and I came across this posting (from gadgetspeak) by “kye04”

hi there.found a new version,release 02-Nov.-06

http://www.buffalo-asia.com/file/download/WYR-G54_1.402.zip

Please tell me the changes beacuse the router is at my sister ,200km from home and i do not want to make an upgrade from here to mess everything up.

And this one, (in a different thread), by “humbletim”

Hi — I was about to toss out my WYR-G54 after its wireless support started flaking out and not finding any firmware upgrades beyond 1.402. However, after some desparate Googling I discovered an interesting post from japan claiming that the WYR-G54 has the same internals as some other OEM devices, namely the BLW-54PM from Planex…

http://raijo.aa0.netvolante.jp/computer/wyr_g54/

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fraijo.aa0.netvolante.jp%2Fcomputer%2Fwyr_g54&sl=ja&tl=en

I EXPECTED to totally brick my device by following the roughly translated instructions, but instead am pleased to report that my device now believes it’s a BLW-54PM version 3.000 firmware Planex unit!

The wireless seems much more robust than before and the Planex web UI supports some formerly inaccessible options (like manually adding MAC addresses for access/routing). The rest of the web interface has a different theme but is essentially the same — you can preview it in the PDF manual from Planex (same link as below). That’s actually how I (informally) validated the possibility that these two devices are siblings.

So, if you have an old WYR-G54, and you don’t mind potentially killing it, the process I used was:

** DO NOT APPLY THIS UPGRADE IF YOU ARE NOT PREPARED TO BRICK (render useless) YOUR ROUTER. **

1. Download WYR-G54_1.402.zip (the link in earlier post above still worked as of today)
2. Download Planex BLW-54PM v3.000 firmware from: http://www.planex.net/download/router/blw-54pm.htm
3. Extract both firmware .IMG files (WYR-G54_Eng_1402.img, BLW-54PM_Firmware_PCI_ENG_v3000.img). Write down the freshly extracted v3000.img file size — in bytes (mine was 720311).
4. Use a hex editor to exactly clone (overwrite not insert) the first 52 bytes and the last 40 bytes from the WYR image to the BLW image. I used KHexEdit on linux, but you should be able to find a hex editor for any platform via google. Note that the last 40 bytes will _start_ at a different location in each file, so be sure to work backwards from the end of each file individually when cloning those.
5. (not sure if this is needed): I saw “14 02” at offset 50 and also in the last 40 bytes of the WYR, along with “30 00” in the same locations in the BLW image, so assumed these were version markers. After cloning the WYR bytes over with “14 02” I then changed them both to be “14 03” (in case maybe the router consider this before upgrading).
6. Save the resulting image as something memorable, I used “WYR1403.img”. As a high level check, make sure the original v3000 firmware and your transplanted image are exactly the same file size — if not the clone procedure removed or added bytes which is wrong so try again. For reference, with the #5 version change the md5sum of my image was: 7023cbc9946be3eb444ade76a3f82e57
7. Backup your config settings (admcfg.cfg) and purchase a backup router and/or have a contigency plan ready (remember this could totally brick your device!)
8. (optional — not sure if really needed) Reset your device to factory defaults
9. Connect via cat5 and upgrade your WYR-G54 using the standard web UI and your new image.
10. cross your fingers, let the firmware screen finish loading, and see if it worked!

NOTE: I did not reset my device to factory defaults before upgrading, but in hindsight it might have been a good idea. Looking at the saved config files (admcfg.cfg) before and after the upgrade, only a handful seem to mesh up — for example, it kept my admin password but none of the LAN or access point settings

The BLW-54PM docs say the factory admin login is a blank username and “0000” (four zeros) for the password, but as mentioned it actually kept my admin password so my login was blank username and my old password at 192.168.1.1 (vs. “root” before).

Good luck to anyone else daring enough to try this! 😉

Best regards,

-Tim

Well, I was brave/stupid enough, and I got the same results!

I haven’t extensively tested it yet, but the Wii seemed a whole lot happier!

Enjoy.