The Lauralympics and 'Real Life Cluedo'

My daughter Laura turned thirteen a couple of weeks ago and to mark the occasion we had a party-cum-sporting-contest called the Lauralympics. There were five events – Table football, Playstation Dance Mat, Beaker Knockdown, Kerplunk and Quickfire Quiz – with gold, silver and bronze medals being awarded for each event.

A couple of weeks before the party, the guests divided themselves into three teams. Each team was asked to come up with a team name, a team anthem (to be sung by the winning team at each event’s medal ceremony) and a team flag (to be hoisted as the anthem was sung). After some deliberation, the teams decided to call themselves the Teacup Turtles, the Mighty Morphing Unicorns and the Rainbow Poopin’ Rabbits.

We made t-shirts for each team using iron-on transfers, bought some plastic medals, and improvised a winners’ rostrum and a flagpole out of some plastic crates and the handle of a fruit-picker.

Here are some photos of this momentous sporting occasion.

"If you build it, they will come." The competition venue awaits

Each team made their own flag.

The Mighty Morphing Unicorns take on the Teacup Turtles at table football.

The girls had not used a dance mat before, so my wife gave them a tutorial.

My daughter proudly hoists the Rainbow Poopin' Rabbits Flag during a medals ceremony

It's only a matter of time before Kerplunk is included in the real Olympics.

You don't want to get between this girl and her stack of beakers!

Everything to play for in the final Quickfire Quiz event.

The Teacup Turtles

The Mighty Morphing Unicorns

The Rainbow Poopin' Rabbits

Real Life Cluedo

To add some extra fun to the proceedings we played a special Lauralympics version of Real Life Cluedo throughout the party.

Loosely based on the Cluedo board game, Real Life Cluedo is a great game to play if you’re staying with friends or family for a weekend. In the regular version of the game all the players are given three small pieces of paper. Each player writes their name on the first, an object that can be found around the house on the second and a room in the house on the third. Each of the three pieces of paper is folded and put into one of three bowls along with the other players pieces. The contents of the bowls are mixed up and then each player takes a piece of paper from each bowl. If a player draws their own name from the first bowl, they simply put it back and draw another. It doesn’t matter if a player picks out the same object or room that they put into the bowl.

Each player will now have a secret murder mission consisting of the name of another player, an object and a room. To win the game a player has to survive being "murdered", while murdering as many of the other players as possible, starting with the name they've just drawn.

For example, David has picked “Josie”, “Book” and “Kitchen” out of the bowls. David will have "murdered" Josie if she accepts or picks up a book while she’s in the kitchen. Josie must accept or pick up the book of her own accord - David can’t drop it into her lap or force it upon her in any other way. Once Josie has been murdered, she’s out of the game, but she passes on her own murder mission to David. If David completes Josie’s murder mission, he has to carry out the next victim’s mission and so on. If someone murders David, his murderer picks up David’s mission at that time.

If David murders a player who has a mission to murder him, he becomes a survivor and can stop playing. Depending on how the game plays out, a player may be able to murder all of the other players, but the game often results in a draw if two or more survivors succeed in murdering whoever is trying to murder them.

The regular version of the game described above can take days to play out and the Lauralympics only lasted a few hours. So to speed things up, I wrote the murder missions in advance and combined the objects and rooms on one piece of paper, choosing objects that would definitely be found in those rooms. To make it even easier, there was a choice of two rooms for each mission.

The murder missions we used for our simplified version of the game.

This simplified version of the game worked really well. One of the girls went on a killing spree, murdering six other players during the party before being murdered herself in the final half hour and we ended up with two survivors just before the party finished.

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