Early Collaborative Games of Fantasy and Imagination

• Games with fantasy elements (especially the collaborative storytelling game "The Impromptu Tale")
• Games with role-playing elements (especially the collaborative social interaction game "The Butterfly")
• Games with Surrealist elements (especially the collaborative storytelling game "The History")
• Earlier sources (for example, seven classical mythology games published in the late Renaissance)

Collaborative Storytelling Games with Fantasy Elements

• Text and translation of "The Impromptu Tale" (ca. 1812)
• Text and translation of "The Impromptu Tale" (ca. 1817; also 1852; partially in English, 1837)
• Text and translation of "The Impromptu Tale" (1818)

Some earlier and later variants of "The Impromptu Tale" omit fantasy elements, but their rules are still more complex than later games in English such as "Rigmarole" in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868; which does have a fantasy aspect to it) and The Huddersfield College Magazine (1875; which has a Christmas ghost story), "Improvisatore" (1882; which has a fairy tale example), or "The All-Around Story Game" (1895):

• Text and translation of "The Impromptu Romance" (1801; also 1808 and 1825)
• Text and translation of "The Impromptu Romance" (1830; also 1836, 1846, and 1867; partially in English, 1837)
• "Le Roman impromptu" (1873; a very brief version lacking the "twist" rule)
• Text and translation of "The Impromptu Romance" (ca. 1903--a brief version that also appeared in German in 1902)

• Redeeming Forfeits, a.k.a. Pledges
• Notes on playing "The Impromptu Tale," including story destinations from Sara Coleridge's secondary world fantasy novel, Phantasmion (1837)

• Text and translation of "The Game of the Romance" in Les Jeux d'esprit (1701)
• Text and translation from Gallant and Playful Story, Interrupted ... (1777 [1673])
• Text and translation of "Interrupted Stories" (1779)

Notably, the memoirs of Marie Du Bois, valet de chambre to Louis XIV, describe the young king playing this game in 1655, when he would have been around 17 years old. In the evenings, after dancing,

[O]n joue aux petits jeux comme aux romans. L'on s'assied en rond. L'un commence un sujet de roman et suit jusqu'à ce qu'il soit dans quelque embarras. Cela estant, celuy quy est proche prend la parole et suit de mesme, ainsy de l'ung à l'autre les avantures se trouvent, où il y en a quelquefois de bien plaisantes. Minuit estant proche, le Roy donne le bonsoir à la Reine

Little games like novels are played. People sit in a circle. One person begins a subject for a romance and continues it until he is in some difficulty. This being the case, his neighbor speaks and continues in the same way, so from one to the other there are adventures, sometimes very pleasant ones. Midnight being near, the King bids good evening to the Queen

Two untranslated variants of the game with complete examples can be found in the final third of the "Second Day" of La Maison des jeux published in 1642 by Charles Sorel (a novelist and historian who had been an advisor to Louis XIII in 1640). The Game of the Romance is also mentioned briefly in de Scudéry's 1667 "Games, Serving as a Preface to Mathilde." A verse rendering of the fairy tale "La Creste de Coq-d'Inde" (1712) came about in much the same way as a jeu du roman: the Duchess of Maine proposing that Nicolas de Malézieu and Charles-Claude Genest take evenly-divided turns composing it over the course of three afternoons. And the Comte de Caylus's 1743 fairy tale "La Princesse Lumineuse" still mentions the game, listing it among other games known in reality but within the context of the fairy tale being 'invented' for the amusement of an imaginary king. Earlier story games existed as well, e.g. telling a story to illustrate a proverb (1642) or the very simple combinatoric story game of "Thief" (1551).

However, the two forms given by Sorel for the Game of the Romance are especially interesting. In the first, shorter form, one player must invent a story incorporating a list of words selected at the start, a challenge accepted throughout the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries (e.g. also published by Harsdörffer as "Die zergliederte Mähre" in 1645 in the 5th book of his Gesprächspiele; and forming the basis of a short story published in Mercure Galant in July 1704, notably claiming an unnamed woman reinvented the game based on bout rimés in poetry; as well as an enigma by Jacques Vergier published in 1726; poetry in the Journal de Paris in 1780; Kotzebue's novel History of My Father in 1788; GutsMuths's game "Die Erzähler, oder das Geschichtemachen" in 1796; a fable in Mercure de France in 1802; a monthly song composition challenge in L'Epicurien français in 1808; "Das einfache Wörterspiel" in 1828; etc.).

After giving an example of this first kind of "Game of the Romance," Sorel himself introduces the topic of bout-rimés, in which the final rhyming words of a poem are given while leaving the bulk of the poem for others to work out. Bout-rimés show up in parlor game manuals much later too, e.g. as a forfeit task in 1801 (not to mention poetry by John Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Alexandre Dumas), and it is tempting to see in them a list of verbal 'destinations' to incorporate, very like those given for this first form of the "Jeu du roman." In any case, there are interesting examples and/or discussions of bout-rimés in 1696, 1735, 1738, 1746, 1747, 1755, 1764 (especially), 1775, 1787, and 1795.

In the second and longer form of the "Jeu du roman" given by Sorel, multiple players take turns together, narrating one unified story with many contributors. Incidentally the story given as an example is set in classical Crete and feature sacrifices to the god Saturn, oracular divination, and other occasional mythological references.

"The Impromptu Tale" combines both of those game mechanics--a list of words set out at the beginning and also collaborative narration--and since the former mechanic can be found in "The Game of the Romance" in an overlapping timeframe and the latter mechanic at an earlier date, a genealogical relationship between "The Impromptu Tale" and "The Game of the Romance" seems likely. The additional rule in "The Impromptu Tale" that a narrator should from time to time lead up to an obvious word for which another player supplies a non-obvious replacement is remarkable as an innovative form of play focused on counterfactual plotting.

As an aside, these games are comparable to but not quite the same as collaboratively-written 'steeplechase' novels such as the one containing "Der Schlammbeißer" (1818; text; but note that this chapter was based on a given word) and others such as Die Versuche und Hindernisse Karls (1807-1809 by the Nordsternbund), Lotto und Liebesglück (1828), La Croix de Berny (1855), A Casca de caneleira (1866), The Fate of Fenella (1892), X... Roman impromptu (1895), The Whole Family (1908), Consequences (1933; based on a different parlor game--see below), or other models of literary collaboration, including the shared world of Mugby Junction (1866) or round-robin works by the Detection Club (1930s).

Collaborative Games with Role-Playing Elements

Several parlor game manuals also include a trivial "let's pretend" kind of game called "The Butterfly" in which each player takes the role of a flower or insect and describes their feelings and actions vis-à-vis the opposite. Among adults, goals of the game evidently included flirting with specific players and/or allegorically discussing gender in essentialist terms. "Let's pretend" games have always been with us. Consider the king game in Herodotus or βασιλίνδα in Pollux (described in this recent monograph or this Latin text from 1627), which may be forms of "Truth or Dare" that involved electing a king or queen as in the medieval game "The King Who Does Not Lie" and its likely successor "Questions and Commands." Or see the inventive games played by the Brontë children and the "let's pretend" games played by Prince Albert soon after visiting the school where GutsMuths ran "Color War"-style Kriegsspiele (q.v. below but especially this blog post on Count Mensdorff's recollections and Prince Albert's journal from 1/17/1830 and 4/17/1830). Or see classical / early medieval military simulations, the "mock tournaments" and imaginary "shop" in Bruegel's "Children's Games," and the "let's pretend" games of Tudor children, kids in 1885, and kindergartners ca. 1914. But like most "let's pretend" games, "The Butterfly" has no resolution mechanics for contested facts within its tiny flowerbed world. Nonetheless this is early documentation of an imaginative game with numerous rules and roles to play at indefinite length being combined with improvised first-person perspectives in an adult social circle.

• Text and translation of "The Game of the Butterfly" (1801; also 1808 and 1825)
• Text and translation of "The Butterfly" (ca. 1812)
• Text and translation of "The Butterfly" (1830; also 1836, 1846, and 1867)
• An English translation of the game (1833; this is a translation of Celnart's version by the American novelist, abolitionist, activist and fairy tale author Lydia Maria Child, and incidentally her text includes an early form of the game / programming exercise FizzBuzz, called "Buz!"--Child's text was later edited by board game designer Laura Valentine who also edited an 1867 text that included a version of Buz that also had Fiz)
• An English translation of the game (1853)
• Another English translation of the game (1854)
• Another English translation of the game (1859)
• A French version of the game from 1860, aimed at young girls, allows each player to speak just once, but the version from 1830 is clear that it could go on indefinitely
• Text and translation of "The Butterfly" (1865)
• "The Butterfly and the Flowers," described in English (1869; a version having only the one insect)
• "The Revolt of the Flowers" (Christmas 1873; published in a games supplement to The Young Ladies' Journal, this is a variant of "The Butterfly and the Flowers" having only flowers and a scripted story rather than improvisation--in "Belles, Beaux, and Paratexts: American Story Papers and the Project of Romance," William Gleason describes the game appearing in 1874 in Beadle and Adams's Belles and Beaux, a romance story paper)
• Text and translation of "The Butterfly" (ca. 1903; a brief version notable for establishing over a century of continuity for the game)

One game from the late Renaissance, though, is especially notable for its modest LARP-like qualities: "The Game of Ceremonies" (1555). The rules instruct players to take on named roles such as Adonis or Galatea or the nonhuman roles of Nymphs and Dryads to act out a ritual sacrifice to Venus and Cupid--whose roles are also taken on by specific players. Players have very little agency in acting out their roles but not none: they choose what gifts to offer and whom to call on next. "The Game of Ceremonies" is still very much a parlor game, as the point of it was to create occasions for forfeits to redeem by answering thoughtful questions at the end of the game (it's unclear whether the gifts counted as forfeits or whether errors in the ritual are the cause of forfeits or both). But it is remarkable for being a game of gods and magic assigning one-to-one correspondences between players and characters--none of which are abstractions or inanimate objects, as in some other Renaissance games--with the explicitly stated goal of having fun.

If parlor games exerted any influence--however indirect--on the history of modern tabletop games involving storytelling or role-playing, one place to find it might be in the biography of H.G. Wells (1866-1946), whose rules for Little Wars published in 1913 typify wargaming with miniatures, a tradition that eventually gave rise to Dungeons & Dragons. Wells was aware of many parlor games. His 1911 novel The New Machiavelli makes an allusion to "Hunt the Slipper" (a well-known parlor game depicted in chapter 11 of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield in 1766). His 1918 novel Joan and Peter describes acting charades, hide-and-seek games "Ogre" and "Darkness Ogre," a card game called "Demon Patience," and specific rules for the partially silent version of "Crambo" (a.k.a. "Rhyming Words in Pantomime," which had been a favorite of Karl Marx). In general, he often refers to games: chess, the card game "Nap," spellicans, and more. However, aside from a brief reference to the card game whist, the text of neither Little Wars nor Floor Games implicates anything like parlor games as influences, and in The New Machiavelli, chapters 2 and 3 offer fictionalized pictures of playing games of "phantom warfare" as a child and young adult with no mention of parlor games. Wells instead describes a variety of influences and experiences--e.g. the garden wargames in Tristram Shandy, Kriegsspiel, and his own childhood imagination--that are independent from parlor games, even if he knew some and could conceivably have known others.

Collaborative Storytelling Games with (Proto-) Surrealist / Oulipian Elements

Parlor games that involve some kind of narration, however strange, also had some presence in France in the 20th Century:

• The Surrealist game of "Exquisite Corpse" (ca. 1925; one of many Surrealist games that are well-documented, particularly in the end notes to A Book of Surrealist Games; very famously, this is a game that involves collaboratively generating a surreal narrative as each player contributes a portion of the narrative with little information about what has come before and what will come next, usually by folding a piece of paper to show only one word or phrase as a cue for the next contributor--but the initial mechanics of the game are surprisingly ambiguous, and also it evolved to include drawings on folded paper)
• "La Bande dessinée" in Le Grand Livre des jeux à la maison (1977; a modern parlor game that invites players to tell stories based either on a tarot deck or a deck of imagery they've drawn for themselves--even suggesting a list of imagery like a witch, an assassin, gifts, travel, marriage, prison, money, etc. Players are dealt 7 cards each and divide into 2 teams. The first player on a team should try to play a character, the second a situation, and the third a place. Then they play out a story contributing one card after another as the leader of the game writes it up. The other team is doing the same, and at the end you compare stories and the "best" wins--but playing with no winner is also encouraged. As a game where players take turns connecting motifs in a story one by one, this is especially similar to Sorel's first variant of "The Game of the Romance" but also similar to the second variant and to "The Impromptu Tale" in that players take turns with the story)

L'un de nous dit : « Si on jouait aux "petits papiers", c'est très amusant. » Et on joua aux « petits papiers » traditionnels. Mr. rencontre Mme ; il lui parle, etc. Cela ne dura pas. On élargit très vite. « Il n'y a qu'à mettre n'importe quoi », dit Prévert.

Au tour suivant, le Cadavre exquis était né. Sous la plume de Prévert, précisément, qui en écrivit les premiers vocables, si bien complétés par les suivants ; l'un : boira le vin ; l'autre : nouveau. [p. 283]

One of us said: "If we played petits papiers, that's a lot of fun. So we played petits papiers in a traditional way. Monsieur meets Madame. He speaks to her, etc. That didn't last. We expanded on it very quickly. "Just put anything--doesn't matter what," said Prévert.

On the next turn, Exquisite Corpse was born under the pen of Prévert, precisely, who wrote the first words, so well completed by those following; the one: will drink the wine; the other: new.

Looking at each detail of Collinet's account, there are several points of interest relative to the history of parlor games:

• Petits papiers is not a very specific term. In texts from 1888 / 1889, it likely refers to a family of verbal question and answer games--"Cross Purposes," "Cross Questions and Crooked Answers," "Les Coqs-à-l'âne," specific versions of "Le Propos interrompu," etc.--although by the late 19th C., these texts suggest people may have been using slips of paper to confuse the questions and answers to humorous effect or even just to play "The Game of Definitions" earnestly without knowing who said what. In Collinet's account, it refers to a different family of games--"Consequences," "Résultats," and some variants of "L'Histoire"--which were played on paper but probably descend from whispering games. And in a text from 1939, it refers to a brief divination game.
• It is not possible to conclude from Collinet's account exactly which game in the "Consequences" family they were playing, but she notably omits the term consequences or résultats itself--normally a steady feature of "Consequences"--and just says the Monsieur and Madame rencontrent and parlent, which are features of "Consequences," but the game that steadily includes those features but only sometimes mentions résultats per se is "L'Histoire," exemplified in this brief 1903 variant which uses the same template as "Consequences."
• It is also unclear from Collinet's account what prior experience the poet Jacques Prévert may have had with "L'Histoire," which has several variants in which "Just put anything--doesn't matter what" would be normal, including variants from 1812 that involve paper-folding to add arbitrary text and also inventing your own 'fields' of actions to fill in on different pieces of paper. It would be easy enough for him to invent either game mechanic, but Collinet doesn't exclude the possibility he had seen something like this previously.

When "The History" first appeared in Antoine Fabre d'Olivet's pseudonymously-written Le Savant de société (1801), its example of play was not very surreal, perhaps having been made up as an example of how the game might work in theory, so Léon Collier concluded the history of "The History" probably ended there. But d'Olivet's Le Savant de société was a sudden hit, rapidly imitated, paraphrased, and/or expanded on. Ducœurjoly's Les Nouveaux Savans de société appeared later the same year. The second edition of Le Manuel des sorciers was expanded in 1802 to include parlor games. And the examples of play for "The History" in manuals published in Le Petit Savant de société (1812), Les Jeux innocents de société (1817), and so on show much more interesting outcomes. A verse example published in 1812 is particularly striking for its Surrealism avant la lettre, and a prose example from 1817 is at least absurd. Still, inventing "Exquisite Corpse" solely on the basis of "Consequences" remains completely plausible. Some other Surrealist games do strongly resemble earlier games--for example, "One Into Another" more or less combines the centuries-old games "Métamorphoses" and "What is My Thought Like?"--but they also typically put some new spin on things, and none of these games are so complex as to preclude independent reinvention.

Incidentally, d'Olivet's 1801 Le Savant de société also includes a proto-Oulipian poem generator that still appears in the 4th ed. from 1824, revised by Pierre Joseph Charrin: "Ave Maria, Hymne Mythologique et Mystérieux, imité du Salutation angélique." Inspired by the Ave Maria cipher developed by Johannes Trithemius in his Polygraphia (1518), d'Olivet composed his own Ave Maria cipher in French, instructing readers to replace each letter in each column of plaintext with a corresponding word or phrase in his cipher, repeating as necessary until the reader has generated ciphertext that looks like a poem--in fact, most of the time, like a hymn to some goddess from classical mythology. Rougemaître's "Couplets" from 1822 is similar, albeit non-mythological, and for what it's worth, another much older poem with combinatoric potential to it, akin to Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes is the Sieur de Porchère's sonnet "Vœux pour sa maiesté" from the early 17th Century.

In any case, here's a selection of games that generate elaborate series of non sequiturs by matching up different players' contributions in a way they couldn't entirely foresee--"The History" in particular turns them into stories and poems--and some later sources, like Frank Leslie's essay on "Consequences" or the collaborative novel Consequences by Elizabeth Bowen, et al., are notable for connecting these games to wider phenomena:

• "Propos" (1460-1466; the 24th case in Martial d'Auvergne's Aresta amorum, revised by Benoît Court in 1533 to include Latin commentary, satirically imagines a young woman bringing a young man to trial over giving her a kiss during a game of "propos," in which he was supposed to whisper a word in her ear instead, so she wants the judge to forbid him from ever touching her again; the young man pretends it was an accident, and the judge simply orders them not to play this game again; playing "au propos" is also mentioned in Rabelais's Gargantua, and since this early source doesn't mention questions, just words being whispered, probably all early instances of "Propos" and "Secreto" from 1460-1657 are essentially the same collaborative story game with only small variations until "Propos interrompus" becomes conflated with "Cross Questions" games sometime after 1657; although this early example provides only one non-rule-governed instance of kissing being involved, the trickery and the objection to it are both reminiscent of later forfeits such as "Kiss the Candlestick," so it may have been common enough to appear in this satirical text as something amusing to complain about by early Renaissance standards)
• "Giuoco del Secreto" (1551; the final essay in this text discusses the relationship between games and the socialization of literary production, and it points out that Ringhieri's "Game of the Secret" is essentially the same as Sorel's "Game of Disconnected Words" from 1643, q.v. next, in that players in a circle each whisper a word or phrase into their neighbor's ear and try to whisper into their next neighbor's ear a word or phrase that could follow; however, in Ringhieri's version, the game is played twice, once clockwise and once counterclockwise, and evidently the person leading the game can demand forfeits from players whose contributions wind up breaking the resulting narrative too badly; the same source also notes the game's resemblance to "Exquisite Corpse" and gives an example based on playing the game in 1974)
• Text and translation of the "Game of Disconnected Words" (1643; an early nonsense story game that involved whispering a word or phrase into your neighbor's ear for them to follow up with a word or phrase in their neighbor's ear until all are revealed aloud; Sorel makes a direct comparison between this game and the Game of the Romance; but by 1811 its name was applied to a somewhat different whispering game more like the English game of "Cross Questions and Crooked Answers"; in the 1709 Nouveau Dictionnaire françois it is defined more simply, as in 1643: "Joüer aux propos interrompus. [Verbis interruptis ludere.] Jeu où l'on joint ensemble des discours qui se disent tout bas à l'oreille des uns des autres pour voir s'ils produiront quelque sens raisonnable ou non." / "Game where one joins together some speech whispered into each other's ears to see if it will produce some reasonable meaning or not." Attestations in 1614, 1716, and 1746 are less clear about the game's evolution, but a callout in the middle of a 1723 instance of bouts-rimés is fun)
• "The Game of Questions and Responses, or of Why and Because" (1643; another game in Sorel, untranslated here, even more similar to later games of "Cross Questions," "Cross Purposes," and "Cross Questions and Crooked Answers"; in Sorel's version, one player whispers a question to another, who asks their neighbor "Why?" and takes their random answer to be the answer to the question posed in a whisper; interestingly, this leads into a discussion of variants played without speaking--just by making signs--much like the modern game known as "Charades," although hundreds of years passed in which "Charades" named different games; the final essay in this text notes that Surrealists including Breton, Aragon, and Queneau contributed to a similarly non-responsive set of "Why"/"Because" and "What is .." questions titled "Le Dialogue en 1928" in issue #11 of La Révolution surréaliste; the introduction to the dialogue references "Exquisite Corpse" and also "le jeu des petits papiers")
• "Cross Questions" and "Cross Purposes" (17th?-19th C.) -- The Anatomy of Melancholy mentions the game of "purposes," a game more likely to involve women in the early 17th C., which may be related to the game of "Cross Purposes" mentioned throughout the 18th and 19th Century. In "Cross Purposes" in 1767, "the answer never corresponds with the question, except it be by chance," and in 1792, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Dugald Stewart uses it to expand on Locke's theory of wit. In 1854, Bogue gives a complete version and compares it to "The Hidden Word," a.k.a. "Le Mot placé," but Bogue's game is identical with the 1811 game "Coqs-à-l'âne." Confusingly, an 1888 dictionary compares "Cross Purposes" with "Cross Questions and Crooked Answers," which in many accounts is instead identical with the 1811 game of "Le Propos interrompu." Many oblique references in 18th C. literature to both "Cross Purposes" and "Cross Questions" support that both games involved confusing conversations, e.g. "Cross Questions" are aggravatingly non-communicative and non-serious--a poem in 1733 and an 1815 text confirms "Cross Questions" has the same confusing effect as "Cross Purposes"--but references like those in Tom Jones or the diary of George Ridpath are ambiguous, and an account in the 1775 diary of Frances Burney is intriguing:

  As my sister knew not well how to wile away the time, I proposed, after supper, a round of cross questions. This was agreed to. Mr. Barlow, who sat next to me, took near half an hour to settle upon what he should ask me, and at last his question was--What I thought most necessary in Love? I answered--Constancy. I hope for his own sake he will not remember this answer long, though he readily subscribed to it at the time.

  Fanny Burney's version of "Cross Questions" is probably just very partial--just relating the question and answer prior to its recontextualization as in "Cross Questions and Crooked Answers"--but in theory it could be a serious "demandes d'amour" kind of game, which is also a better fit contextually for the brief mention of "Cross Questions" in a 1713 edition of The Gentleman Instructed, in the Conduct of a Virtuous and Happy Life. In any event, at least one of these was a game of non sequiturs, and there's an off-chance "Cross Questions" had two variants, one a non sequitur game and the other a "demandes d'amour" / cross-examination game--at a minimum, Burney treated this one question that way, whether or not it was embedded in a nonsense game.
• A large (~25MB) PDF of the untranslated text of Le Savant de société (1801) -- published under the name "Madame de B***" (and incorrectly attributed by the British Library to Madame de Bawr--who was not yet Madame de Bawr at the time), this is--according to pages 300-302 of his memoirs and supported by his likely knowledge of Trithemius, his willingness to credit Madame la Comtesse Jablonwska for skilled instruction in games, and other points of historical plausibility--Antoine Fabre d'Olivet's parlor game manual, described above; on page 107, it gives rules for "The History," followed by an example that Léon Cellier noted as not really being very surreal--see discussion, above--and on page 180, it gives the Ave Maria cipher also described above and more readily available in a later edition
• Text and translation of a passing reference to "The History" (1801) -- in "The Impromptu Romance"
• Texts and translations of "Roosters and Donkeys" and "The Disconnected Word" (1811)
• Text and translation of "The History" (1812; an amazing text with multiple variants of the game, including one mechanically indistinguishable from the text version of "Exquisite Corpse," another similar to "Consequences," and another like "Exquisite Corpse" with rhymed verse)
• Texts and translations for both "The Disconnected Word" and "The History" (1817; also 1852) -- a lengthy example
• "Couplets" (1822 [note: the text is interrupted after p. 222, but it picks back up again a few pages later]; untranslated for now, this is a game of combinatoric poetry, very similar to Raymond Queneau's "Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" from 1961, but players come up with a sort of passphrase of 17 characters, look up each character in a different column of poetic phrases, and generate a poem with a consistent rhyme scheme--the same text suggests using the poems as reversible ciphertexts, and it also includes romantic-themed "oracles" that work in the same way to generate fortunes combinatorically)
• Description of the game "Résultats" a.k.a. "Consequences" in a diary entry for Oct. 10, 1824, written by Anne Lister, a.k.a. "Gentleman Jack"
• Texts and Translations of "The History" and "The History in Verse" (1830; also 1836, 1846, and 1867)
• "Consequences" (1831--an early variant with fewer 'slots' that randomizes their content by drawing cards from a basket; this text is also notable for the semantic triangulation game "What is My Thought Like?" commonly found in 18th-20th C. texts--1786, 1789, 1790, 1806, 1831, 1849, 1855, 1858, 1863, 1867, 1871, 1875, 1904, 1913, 1917, 1922--and mentioned as early as 1750 but which is probably based on the 17th C. game "Le Jeu de la pensée" which differs from but may derive from the "Jeu de la pensée" from 1639 where players simply try to come up with fun reasons why someone is thinking about a thing they say they're thinking about instead of trying to draw connections between two random thoughts which as a game coincidentally resembles Semantle, Enlinko, and Unrelated Words as well as the more fast-paced TikTok Got It / #gotitchallenge game also described by the vlogbrothers)
• An English translation of "The History" (1853)
• "Consequences," described in English (1854)
• An English translation of "The Narrative" (1858) -- the example used here appears earlier in Madame Tardieu-Denesle's 1817 text above
• "The Game of Consequences," described in English (1858)
• An English translation of "The Interrupted Reply" (1859, perhaps based on Madame Tardieu-Denesle's "The Disconnected Word" of 1817--"The Interrupted Reply" is a better translation of the modern game but compare with Sorel's "Game of Disconnected Words" in 1643; this text also includes a card-based 'spin the bottle' game, "The Page of Love" a.k.a. "La Feuille d'amour" in 1830, and a game that uses a die to randomize its requirements, "Confession by a Die")
• "The Narrative" and "Consequences" in English (1861, including examples and also the game of "Cross Questions and Crooked Answers"--i.e. "The Disconnected Word")
• "The Selected Word" (1863, a game of confused questions and answers that generates its randomness in the manner of the storytelling game "Story-Play" a.k.a. "Le Mot placé" from 1830)
• "Consequences" (1868, in a text that also includes "The Game of Definitions"--not so much a 'dictionary game' as something in-between giving a spontaneous discourse on a topic as in de Scudéry, inventing a proverb as in de Voyer, and a 'devil's dictionary' game)
• "Coincidences" (1869; Mary Mapes Dodge's "disconnected" version of the centuries-old tradition of playing with proverbs)
• "Les Propos interrompus" (1874; untranslated for now, this is "The Disconnected Word" / "Interrupted Reply" in a family magazine published in Montreal--also included is a written variant in which the questions and answers are written down on separate pieces of paper and randomized)
• "Consequences" (1883; in a text that also includes a version of the very old nonsense story game "Métiers," in this case titled, "The Reader")
• "Consequences," described in English (1895)
• "Stuff and Nonsense," described in English (1896; a very "Mad Libs"-like game in a text that also has a version of the very old nonsense story game "Métiers," i.e. "Trades"--not to be confused with a similar game called "Trades" or "Professions" that may be even older)
• "The Consequences," a description of the game and a meditation on women's fates by Frank Leslie--which was her legal name (1899)
• Texts and translations of "Disconnected Words" and "The History" (ca. 1903; notable for confirming that "Résultats" / "Consequences"--given here in very much the same terms as in 1824 but also including the variants of "The History" from 1812--was at this time viewed as equivalent to "The History," even while other variants persisted)
• "Consequences" & "Consequences Extended" (1907; author and activist Dorothy Canfield's chapter on "Writing Games" has several story games; the chapter on "Drawing Games" is also notable)
• "Cross Questions and Crooked Answers" (1909; this is "The Disconnected Word," still being described in the 20th C., in a text that also includes "Adjectives," another Mad Libs-like game that goes back at least to Cassell's 1881 game collection)
• Consider the Consequences! (1930; an early 'choose your own adventure'-style interactive novel or gamebook by Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins; the evidence is circumstantial, but given the title, formal structure, themes, and scattered motifs similar to "Consequences," the game may have been a source of inspiration for the book; previously, in 1929, the same authors also published Tell Your Own Fortune, a text more or less in the same genre as fortune books from the 14th-17th Centuries)
• Consequences: A Complete Story in the Manner of the Old Parlour Game in Nine Chapters Each by a Different Author (1933; a collaborative novel structured like the game of "Consequences," including one chapter by Elizabeth Bowen and another by A.E. Coppard)

Earlier Sources for Parlor Games

There are a lot of pre-19th Century parlor game sources (further contexts for many sources are linked in a discussion of redeeming pledges / forfeits):

• Herodotus (430 BCE), Histories (which describes a "let's pretend" king game; described further at Perseus and in this essay)
• Julius Pollux (2nd C.), Onomasticon (which also describes a king game; described further at Perseus and in this essay)
• Suetonius (121 CE), The Twelve Caesars (brief mention of playing "Let's Pretend" as a general / emperor; described at Perseus and in this essay)
• Li He 李郃 (ca. 830-832), Shǎizi xuǎn gé 骰子選格 or "Checkers Selection with Dice" (the first of many game manuals for randomly simulating a bureaucratic career, as described in chapter two of this dissertation and summarized in this Twitter thread; a source from 1895 reproduces an example board from the 17th C. and notes similar games could still be purchased in the 1880s in shops in New York and San Francisco; compare with the similar 1860 game, The Checkered Game of Life, derived from a different source and revised with renewed popularity in the late 20th Century as simply Life; but for additional sources in Chinese, see this dissertation on games inspired by the 18th C. novel Dream of the Red Chamber--e.g. for background, ch. 4 in the dissertation describes poetry competitions and over a thousand years of drinking game manuals)
• Various (11th C. and 12th C.), Utaawase 歌合 / "Poetry Contest," Horikawa-in Ensho Awase / "Competition of Love Poems of the Time of the Cloistered Emperor Horikawa," etc. (among several records of Heian poetry contests; ensho-awase were reportedly informal)
• Jean de Condé (late 13th/early 14th C.), "The Beaten Path" (text and translation of a medieval fabliau illustrating the game of "The King Who Does Not Lie," a likely predecessor to "Questions and Commands" and one of several medieval French descriptions of king/queen games)
• Anonymous (13th C. and 15th C.), "Ragemon le bon & Ragman Roll" (two games, one in French and one in English, that randomly assigned traits to different players--essentially the same as the fortune game "Le Jeu d'aventure," which has no adventure in the modern sense and instead evokes the earlier meaning to take a chance)
• Jean de Meun (early 14th C.), Le Plaisant Ieu du dodechedron de fortune (according to this dissertation but without attribution, first copied in 1356; first printed edition 1556; reprinted 1574 and 1581; and translated into English as The Dodechedron of Fortune; Or, The Exercise of a Quick Wit in 1613; fortune game in which you find a question you want it to answer, appropriate to your situation, from those found grouped into twelve "houses" at the beginning of the manual. On the table of the twelve houses, find the house's row and the starting cell with its matching Roman numeral. Counting that cell as "1," count one cell to the right until you reach the question's number, wrapping around to the left if necessary. Then roll 1d12, and counting the current cell as "1," count one cell downward until you reach the number on the die, wrapping around to the top if necessary. Finally, turn to the page indicated in that cell and look up the number on the die to find the answer, bearing in mind that "if it chance that he doe tell a lye, / That is the sport, for thee to laugh out right"--which is, in addition to it being called a game, especially good evidence that fortune games were not taken seriously)
• Giovanni Boccaccio (ca. 1336), The Filocolo (the fourth book uses as its frame story a king being selected at an informal social gathering to answer demandes d'amour; translated into French in 1531 as Treize Élegantes Demandes d'amour and into English ca. 1566 as Thirteene Most Plesaunt and Delectable Questions; see also this dissertation on games in Boccaccio's Teseida)
• Anonymous (15th C), "The Chaunce of the Dyse" (a Chaucerian fortune game in which players roll a die three times, noting the order of the results, and look up their fortune in the text of the poem; manuscript; another manuscript; more details in this dissertation on medieval games; note that oracles using dice are literally ancient, a practice that persisted even through the Renaissance, but "Chaunce of the Dyse" and later fortune books frequently aim to have "doon folkes plesaunce" or disclaim their seriousness or actually wind up called games or bound together with games, to the point that Tarot researcher Michael Dummett notes that fortune-telling via so-called 'bibliomancy' was "probably not taken very seriously," and there are many relevant examples below from time periods when games could parody ritual and when similar books like Newe Recreations were inarguably used as parlor tricks--see especially Le Plaisant Jeu du dodechedron's name and disclaimers in French and English, the title of Ludus fortunae, ad recreandam societatem, the title of Les Oracles divertissans, the preface to the same author's Le Palais des curieux that mentions it having been an amusement or diversion to "grandes Compagnies" like other parlor games, the afterword to the same text advising people not to believe in its plagiarized dream interpretation manual, Le Palais des Ieux publishing an oracle text and games in the same volume titled as games, the early 19th C. "Jeu des oracles" published in a parlor game manual, etc., etc.; there are other overlaps between games and parlor tricks, especially the fact that their authors were sometimes the same like Ducœurjoly or like whoever added a bunch of parlor games to the second edition of Le Manuel des sorciers, but for comparison with contexts that are more serious, there are sources online translating some representative oracles from Greek)
• Colard Mansion (15th C.; editor), Les Adevineaux amoureux (A collection of demandes d'amour--questions and answers on love which should be interpreted as a conversation/eloquence game, e.g. as in this dissertation and also according to the contemporary views of Charles Sorel in 1664/1667 who explicitly links jeux-partis, question and answer games, Renaissance conversation games in Italy, and games of his own era--coincidentally in a text that also treats novels of chivalry and shepherding as being distinct from realistic novels and also from heroic novels)
• Matteo Maria Boiardo (late 15th C.), The Boiardo Tarocchi Poem (more details; although not a parlor game, this point of overlap between poetry and tarocchi is probably relevant context for parlor gaming--Teofilo Folengo's 1527 Caos del Triperiuno may be as well)
• Lorenzo "Spirito" Gualtieri (ca. 1482), Libro delle sorti (a notable illuminated fortune game book; some images; flip-through; more details)
• Sigismondo Fanti (1526), Triompho di fortuna (another elaborate fortune game book in which players ask a question, roll dice, consider the time of day, and move through a process step by step to arrive at an answer; more details)
• Baldassare Castiglione (1528), The Book of the Courtier (later referenced by Madeleine de Scudéry in her text on games, this mentions several games such as describing in pleasant ways the follies of others--openly yet still not unlike the game of "Secretary" in the 18th-20th centuries)
• François Rabelais (1534-1542), Gargantua (this famously includes a long list of games and George Pollard has done the amazing work of tabulating their textual variations and many translations, making it easier to see that the list includes parlor games such as "au propos," which several translators take to be some variation of "propos interrompus" discussed in detail above, or "a sainct Cosme, je te viens adorer" which is presumably "le jeu de Saint Cosme," a medieval French game similar to the 19th C. forfeit task, "To Play the Judge"--in the medieval game, one person tries to remain silent while others bring them silly and possibly imaginary gifts to make them laugh, and in the 19th C., the silent player takes on the role of a judge while other players bring ridiculous complaints, again trying to make the judge laugh; Pollard also notes Michel Psichari's 1908 article "Les Jeux de Gargantua" as a useful source going into more detail about many of Rabelais's games)
• Francesco Marcolini (1540), Le Sorti (another fortune game, in this case a beautiful one using playing cards to randomize outcomes determined according to a method described at Tarot Forum; fortune books such as Marcolini's were common in the 16th-17th C., in many cases explicitly just for fun and in some cases directly connected with parlor games, e.g. in Colletet's book in 1663; incidentally, these books function in a 'turn to page so-and-so' manner reminiscent of the 1929 fortune manual Tell Your Own Fortune, written by the authors of an early Choose Your Own Adventure-style book, Consider the Consequences; complete copies of Marcolini's book are at the Internet Archive and Google Books; more detail available in this recent monograph on this and other fortune manuals in Italian)
• Innocenzo Ringhieri (1551), Cento giuochi liberali, et d'ingegno (also 1553, 1558, and 1580; discussed in this 2004 monograph, this 2013 monograph, and especially in Thomas Frederick Crane's 1920 Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century, available online; a complete translation of "The Game of Music" exists and see Villiers, next, for further translations; as mentioned above, Ringhieri's "Giuoco del Secreto" has a clear parallel in Rabelais's earlier "propos" and Sorel's later "propos interompus," though it is not in Villiers; on top of Ringhieri's text being reprinted/republished several times and also being partially translated into French by Villiers and as a result partially summarized by Sorel in the "second day" of La Maison des jeux, games very like Ringhieri's are also in Harsdörffer, e.g. compare Ringhieri's game of "The Fisherman, or the Fish" with Harsdörffer's game of "Fish"--either of which may be related to the simpler game of "Fish" not translated by Villiers but played by Vincent Voiture and the Duc d'Anguien ca. 1643 and summarized in a footnote by Pierre Richelet, ca. 1696, at which time Richelet had to consult a Mr. Bourcard Lœffelholz de Colberg--perhaps Georg Burkhard Löffelholz von Kolberg--for an explanation of the game; as in Ringhieri/Harsdörffer's game, the game played by Voiture and the Duke involved each player taking the name of a kind of fish, but by the 1690s, the only significant rule Richelet uncovered was that players needed to name a fish actually in play or else pay a forfeit)
• Claude de Taillemont (1553), Discours des champs faëz à l'honneur et exaltation de l'amour et des dames (also 1576; Roy claims this is one of two texts from the 16th C. in which "les acteurs se contentent de raconter des histoires d'amour et de jouer aux Ventes, aux Métiers, au Corbillon, aux Merveilles et autres jeux français très simples," which if true bears on the list of games in Erondell in 1605)
• Hubert Philippe de Villiers, (1555), Cinquante Jeux divers d'honnete entretien (alt. copies; this is a partial translation of Ringhieri, a copy of which made its way to the library of John Dee court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, and it includes seven games based on classical mythology for which there are rough translations; Villiers text did translate Ringhieri's game of "Virtues," which may be the same game "Virtues" that Peter Erondell / Pierre Erondelle mentioned being played in 1605, below)
• Girolamo Bargagli (1572), Dialogo de' giuochi ... (discussed in this article identifying the women mentioned in the text, this 2013 monograph, and especially in Thomas Frederick Crane's 1920 Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century)
• Jacques Yver (1572), Le Printemps (Roy claims this is one of two texts from the 16th C. in which "les acteurs se contentent de raconter des histoires d'amour et de jouer aux Ventes, aux Métiers, au Corbillon, aux Merveilles et autres jeux français très simples," and there is an easily searchable reference in it to "honnêtes jeux, comme aux merveilles, aux états, aux ventes, aux vertus, aux rencontres, & autres," which bears on the list of games in Erondell in 1605; incidentally, the point Roy is making is Yver's games are simpler than Ringhieri's and unlikely to be related, but note that "Vertus" is a very simple game in Villiers's translation from Ringhieri in 1555)
• Stefano Guazzo (1574), La Civil Conversazione (which in book 4 depicts the selection of a Queen to administer a series of games, etc., for a winter's night of conversation; the fourth book was translated into English in 1586 in The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, evidently offering a point of comparison for Mary Wroth's Love's Victory and Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost)
• Ascanio de Mori (1580 [1574]), Giuoco Piacevole (a fictional text with descriptions of a story game and its penances also discussed in this article at ResearchGate / academia.edu)
• Scipione Bargagli (1587), I Trattenimenti di Scipion Bargagli
• Orazio Vecchi (1604), Le Veglie di Siena (a musical score for a comedy madrigal that reportedly includes a depiction of games involving "mixed-gender conversations")
• Peter Erondell / Pierre Erondelle (1605), The French Garden: For English Ladyes and Gentlewomen to Walke In (a conversation manual with an intriguing but unexplained list of games played in the Elizabethan home--first a list of games played by men, like cards, dice, and chess, and then a list of what sound like parlor games: "The Maydens did play at purposes, at sales, to thinke, at wonders, at vertues, at answers"; by coincidence, "Vertus" was also the name of one of Ringhieri's simplest games translated into French and found in the library of John Dee, putting it in the same vicinity in the same era, and it appears in Yver in 1572 as well; "Wonders" is also in Yver; "Sales" is probably the same as "Ventes" in Yver, but also sounds similar to "Le Corbillon" which was known to de Scudéry in 1667 and attributed to "the first Poets," and "Purposes" sounds like either the game "Purposes" mentioned in The Anatomy of Melancholy and/or "Cross Purposes" common a century later, while "Answers" sounds like "Questions and Commands," definitely found in Queen Elizabeth's court, but which could just as well be "Cross Questions" in either of the forms discussed above, or anything really since the text offers no clues other than names that could change or be applied idiosyncratically)
• Marguerite de Valois (1713 [1628]), Mémoires de Marguerite de Valois (these memoirs, which also record a key point of view on a 'red wedding,' briefly describe one of the "petits jeux de conversation ... d'Italie" in which each says of another the greatest truth they can--noting this was dangerous for members of the court and giving one somewhat insulting exchange of truths as an example)
• François D’Hervé (1630), Le Pantheon et temple des oracles (like The Dodechedron of Fortune above, another fortune game manual; there are some details about it in English)
• Johann Sturm (1633), Ludus fortunae, ad recreandam societatem (like The Dodechedron of Fortune above, another fortune game manual)
• Charles Sorel (1639), Le Berger extravagant (part 1; part 2; translation from 1654; this is notable because part 2 describes people playing le gage touché, which is translated as "Questions and Commands" without needing any explanation, and le gage touché in this instance looks even more like "Truth or Dare" than other early examples of "Questions and Commands"--but the description given in La Maison des jeux looks more like crying the forfeits; another notable point is that Sorel is clearly familiar with Castiglione and Guazzo, in addition to his descriptions of Ringhieri's games in 1642)
• Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1642), Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele ("Erster Theil")
• Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1642), Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiel ("Anderer Theil")
• Charles Sorel (1643 [reprint from 1642]), La Maison des jeux (discussed many places discoverable via Google Scholar)
• Charles Sorel (1642), La Maison des jeux, seconde journee (this includes summaries of the games that Villiers translated from Ringhieri, and about a third of it is devoted to examples of "Le Jeu du roman" / "The Game of the Romance," discussed above)
• Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1643), Gesprächspiele ("Dritter Theil")
• Charles Sorel (1644) Nouveau Recueil des pièces les plus agréables de ce temps (various pieces including the conversation game "Le Jeu du galand" and stories amounting to classical mythology fantasy fiction such as "Les Amours de Venus" and "Relation grotesque, burlesque, comique et macaronique des amours & transformations de Vertumne pour la belle Pomone nymphe neustrienne, avec leur généalogie")
• Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1644), Gesprächspiele ("Vierter Theil"; reportedly including the "first German opera," as described in this article)
• Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1645), Gesprächspiele ("Fünfter Theil"; this contains "Die zergliederte Mähre," a variant of the "Jeu du roman" like the first one given in Sorel)
• Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1646), Gesprächspiele ("Sechster Theil")
• Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1647), Gesprächspiele ("Siebender Theil")
• Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1649), Gesprächspiele ("Achter und Letzter Theil")
• Marc Vulson de la Colombière (1649), Les Oracles divertissans (like The Dodechedron of Fortune and also Colombière's own Le Palais des curieux below, this is another fortune game manual; later edition)
• Marie Du Bois (1655), "Fragments des mémoires inédits de Dubois, gentilhomme servant du Roi, valet de chambre de Louis XII et de Louis XIV" (the entry for this year, 1655, is notable for its description of the Game of the Romance and the fact that Louis XIV played it; the table of contents for this later edition of Dubois's memoirs covers 1655 as well and may or may not include the same fragment)
• Marc Vulson de la Colombière (1655), Le Palais des curieux (like The Dodechedron of Fortune above, not to mention Les Oracles divertissans also by Marc Vulson de la Colombière, this is another fortune game manual, but in addition to a complete fortune game, this manual is also a dream book, providing interpretations for different dream motifs and possibly relevant to parlor games as in Charlotte-Rose Caumont de la Force's "Game of Dreams" in 1701; it was translated into English in 1669 as The Court of Curiositie: scan; text; note that the dream section seems to be copied substantially from De l'Art et jugement des songes, published in 1557 and 1645, although Le Palais des curieux has a preface making clear the work is for sharing in company gathered for socialization and adds an afterword disclaiming strong belief in the details for a number of reasons--dreams are mostly lies, etc.)
• Jean Regnault de Segrais (1656), Les Nouvelles françoises, ou les divertissemens de la Princesse Aurelie (a frame story situates this collection of novellas at a chateau where a visiting princess leads a multi-day storytelling game, specifically described as having a leader and rules at least at the end of the first story; the nature of novels and novellas is also discussed before and between stories)
• Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1674 [1656]), Astronomische kartenspiel (a German-suited deck of cards illustrated didactically with constellations, notable here because of Harsdörffer's involvement)
• Various (1659-1663), Recueil de pieces en prose, les plus agreables de ce temps (in this five-volume collection of prose, volume 1 reproduces several short pieces from Charles Sorel's 1644 collection Nouveau Recueil des pièces les plus agréables de ce temps; volume 3 has two fictionalized accounts of parlor games, "The Game of Beasts" and "The Game of Virtues & Vices," at least the latter of which involves collecting forfeits; volume 4 has an amusing "Bacchic Almanac"; and volume 5 has a "Roman ou Histoire, Heroique et Comique" with a frame story involving a masquerade at Carnival)
• François Colletet (1663), Le Palais des ieux, de l'amour, et de la fortune (the bulk of this text is a fortune game similar to Le Plaisant Ieu du dodechedron de fortune / The Dodechedron of Fortune described above, only instead of rolling a d12 you essentially choose a number from 1 to 16; however it concludes with a brief, written allegorical geography akin to the "Map of Tendre," etc., and also with a collection of four parlor games titled "L'Escole des ieux, ou les honnestes passe-temps des bonnes compagnies")
• Charles Sorel (1663), Oeuvres diverses, ou discours meslez (various works; one tangential connection to parlor games includes "The Masquerade of Love," a short story in which a company organized for things like parlor games is visited by a group masquerading as Diana, Pallas, and Diana's nymphs who play some dice games and leave; incidentally, this also mentions a "Conte des Fées" as if it were a well-known genre, where English sources often attribute the term to Madame d'Aulnoy--but there are sources throughout the 17th C. using the term as a genre, e.g. explained in 1678 as "un conte de Fées, c'est à dire d'une tradition fabuleuse dont on entretien les enfans")
• Madeleine de Scudéry (1667), "Les Jeux, servant de préface à Mathilde" (Text and translation; much of de Scudéry's text is devoted to a game very like the game "Impromptu" from 1917)
• Denis de la Marinière (1668), La Maison des jeux academiques (this generally contains card games, board games, etc. not involving conversation, but its name is similar enough to Sorel's La Maison des jeux to be conflated with it, and it does have some interesting things like a version of "The Royal Pastime of Cupid")
• Charles Sorel (1671), Les Recreations galantes (this has many games, and it's possible some differ from those in La Maison des jeux, although many titles are the same)
• Charles Sorel (1671), L'Histoire des pensées meslée de petits jeux (this is a story about nobles being gallant and falling in love, and the titular games mixed into it are more like creative courtly behavior, e.g. putting on a play--coincidentally to do with a butterfly engaging with a flower--and afterwards sending a woman a basket of flowers each with a thought attached, which is not the only point in the story where there's a long list of independent thoughts that resemble the output of a game in which each thought could have been contributed by a different person)
• Richard Flecknoe (1675), A Treatise of the Sports of Wit (which describes a series of parlor games--a fortune game like several above, acting out proverbs as in Sorel, interpreting dreams as in La Force, etc.--purportedly played near Brussels with the Duchess of Lorraine and others along with a masque/opera, etc.; Flecknoe, himself author of a masque, describes the games as originating in Italy, traveling to France via Catherine de Medici and England via Sir Philip Sidney--Line Cottegnies offers useful context and a good overview of 16th-17th C. parlor game sources in "Jeux littéraires en France et en Angleterre au XVIIe siècle – des salons parisiens à Aphra Behn")
• Edward Phillips (1685 [1658?]), The Mysteries of Love & Eloquence (this has a detailed account of "Questions and Commands" as well as a "Crambo" dictionary, jokes/riddles, and a collection of proverbs that could be useful in parlor games; "Questions and Commands" is also found in Giacomo Surian's letter about the court of Queen Elizabeth in 1566, The Anatomy of Melancholy in the early 1600s, Samuel Butler's poem Hudibras in the late 1600s, Richard Steele's The Tatler in 1710, Winter Evening Tales in 1731, a brief 1761 essay on Catherine I attributed to Oliver Goldsmith, Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield in 1766, and a British traveler's account of a wedding in Mobile, Alabama, ca. 1836--but perhaps also in the 13th-14th C. fabliaux of Baudouin and Jean de Condé and in particular Jean de Condé's "The Beaten Path," available in amateur translation)
• François Hédelin Aubignac (1673), Histoire galante et enjouée, interrompue par des entretiens de civilité, d'amitié et de passetemps (story sequence reproduced in the January and March 1777 volumes of Bibliotheque Universelle des Romans; the frame story is essentially a jeu du roman; an English translation of this story also appeared in the April 1819 issue of Blackwood's Magazine under the title, "History of the Lovers of Quimper-Corentin")
• Eustache le Noble (1697), Le Gage touché (story sequence in which the frame story is a game of forfeits being reclaimed by telling a story; loosely translated and abridged in 1731 as Winter Evening Tales, &c.; as one example of a translation issue, the French text also mentions a game of "Bull's Foot," replaced in English with "Questions and Commands," which is a kind of game a little too similar to le gage touché itself to make much sense)
• Charles de Saint-Évremond (1699), "Bord de la Tapisserie," in Saint-Evremoniana in his Œuvres meslées (this short essay collects brief songs/poems and observations in connection with a kissing game; although "Truth or Dare"-like kissing games can be found earlier, this game evidently involved some randomization / impersonal selection of the person to kiss, more like "Spin the Bottle"; a player first thinks of three people they might kiss, then they pass a blade of grass three times over the mouth of another player who says which pass tickled them most, thereby indicating which of the three people to kiss; the essay notes that, much like Goethe, there was an abbot who didn't want to be kissed and who contributed a poem/song instead)
• Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force (1862 [1701]), Les Jeux d'esprit (text and translation of a novel by a well-known fairy tale author, told as a series of parlor games including the collaborative "Jeu du Roman" also exemplified in Sorel and mentioned by de Scudéry)
• Abel Boyer (1702), The Royal Dictionary, English and French (notable because part 2 offers a definition of "Questions and Commands": "C'est un petit Jeu de Conversation, en celui qui preside fait à chacun de la Compagnie deux Questions & un Commandement, ou une Question & deux Commandements burlesques pour divertir la Compagnie" / "It's a little conversation game, in which the one who presides gives each of the Company two Questions & a Command, or a Question & two burlesque Commands to entertain the Company")
• Joseph Addison (1711), The Spectator, No. 245 (a brief account of several "Winter Night" games, some of which are described in more detail elsewhere, e.g. "Similes" and "Questions and Commands")
• Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon the Duchesse of Maine, Nicolas de Malézieu, and Charles-Claude Genest (1712), "La Creste de Coq-d'Inde" in Les Divertissements de Seaux (a traditional fairy tale rendered in verse turn by turn over the course of three afternoons at the suggestion of the Duchess of Maine--not quite a jeu du roman, but close and occurring in a similar context; see more generally the Grandes Nuits de Sceaux inspired by the Duchess of Maine's masked balls at Mardi Gras and over which, as in old parlor games, Kings and Queens were appointed to govern; the Duchess and her friends also organized a parody version of a chivalric order, the Order of the Honeybee or mouche à miel; see also and also and especially; more generally, compare with masquerades metaphorically described as games themselves in this dissertation)
• Laurent Bordelon (1716), La Coterie des anti-façonniers etablie dans L. C. J. D. B. L. S (section 18, about the probably-fictionalized poet "Scandide," describes a game similar to Bargagli's 1572 "Giuoco del A.B.C."; in Bargagli, players give in order, for each letter of the alphabet, some line of poetry that begins with their letter; in Bordelon, players give in order, for each letter of the alphabet, a word that begins with the next player's letter and the next player must give a line of poetry that uses that word; Bordelon was a satirist and multiple sources suggest his social circle of 'anti-façonniers' didn't exist)
• "Dick Merryman" (1732), Round About Our Coal Fire: or, Christmas Entertainments (pages 8-11 describe several games, including "Questions and Commands," and the stories of witches and ghosts are notable for implying they don't exist; Wikimedia has an edition from 1734 that has been revised and expanded a little; Google Books has a later reprint; it's a little unclear how these texts have been dated, but a reference to attending the notorious play Hurlothrumbo suggests they could not have been written before the play's premiere on March 29, 1729)
• Rev. William Webster [?] (1738), "The Craftsman Feb. 4 N° 604," a.k.a. "Origin of the Plays and Pastimes of Children," in The Gentleman's Magazine (attribution uncertain--see Emily Lorraine de Montluzin's "Attributions of Authorship in The Gentleman's Magazine"; this short article describes several games, including the acting of "Proverbs" also mentioned in Sorel, de Voyer, and others, a game called "Similes" that somewhat resembles both "Roosters & Donkeys" and "Metamorphoses," and the game "Questions and Commands")
• August von Kotzebue (1778), History of My Father (a.k.a. Geschichte meines Vaters and The Comic Romance; or the Life of My Father; this is a novella-length example of the "given words" variant of le jeu du Roman / das Geschichtemachen as described above with shorter examples--however, Kotzebue mentions being inspired by the Spiel des Witzes of bout rimés, which is a similar challenge sometimes given as a forfeit task requiring the penitent to compose a poem using the given end-rhymes, so perhaps Kotzebue invented the storytelling version independently)
• Marc Antoine René de Voyer de Paulmy d'Argenson and André Guillaume Contant d'Orville (1779), Manuel des châteaux
• Pierre M. Huvier des Fontenelles (1788), Les Soirées amusantes (this influential collection, which includes "The Twelve Questions," was advertised in the Journal de Paris on Feb. 26, 1788 but soon drew a letter of complaint about whether it was appropriate for girls/daughters or should be left to fathers and mothers; a new edition appeared in 1790; in its entry for Les Soirées amusantes--untranslated for now--Barbier's 1824 Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes et pseudonymes gives considerable detail on this author and his work, as well as several others with games translated above)
• Amand König (publisher; 1790), Die angenehme Gesellschaft: eine Sammlung neuer Unterhaltungs- und Pfänderspiele in französischem Geschmack (this has many "French-flavored" games like "The Twelve Questions" plus many forfeits in the section "Wie man die Pfänder löset")
• "Aficionado" (1792), Lícito recreo casero, ó coleccion de cincuenta juegos conocidos comunmente con el nombre de juegos de prendas (this does not appear to be online, but a reprinted edition from 1816 is inexpensive, and several 19th C. game collections in Spanish, listed among collections of forfeits, have clearly adapted material also present in the 1816 edition)
• Johann Nikolaus Martius, et al. (1794), Unterricht in der natürlichen Magie, vol. 8 (this has a section on probability related to throwing dice, as well as a handful of games such as Advokatenspiel / L'Avocat)
• Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths (1796), Spiele zur Übung und Erholung des Körpers und Geistes (this has an appendix on pledges and penances and a game called "Die Erzähler, oder das Geschichtemachen" in which a story with no particular theme must be extemporized that connects a preset hodgepodge of words one by one; in its basic form, it is reminiscent of the alphabetic stories with required elements in Ascanio de Mori's 1574 Giuoco Piacevole or, especially, Sorel's first variant of "The Game of the Romance" from 1642 but the third variant given for GutsMuths's game involves players contributing motifs to work into the story by surprise, as in "The Impromptu Romance" from 1801; note too that this contains a variant of "L'Avocat" / "Das Advokatenspiel" called "Parlament" / "Parliament" which involves very light roleplaying as the King, Chancellor, Secretary, and members of parliament to argue strategic matters of state such as "whether one should be allied with the [Ottoman] Porte, recognize the [French] Republic, continue the war, [or] levy a new tax or not," the actual game being to respond appropriately for someone you're paired with as in "L'Avocat"; furthermore, this has an index entry for "Kriegsspiel" pointing to a missing game in a section of the manual connected with outdoor activities such as building a snow fort and having snowball fights, but F.W. Klumpp's 1845 edition adds the complete description for "Kriegsspiele," which turn out to be a similar sort of "Color War"-style LARPing in which players have military ranks / roles and a home base or castle, seek out other players to take prisoner by wrestling them to the ground, and engage in light roleplay such as holding a court martial--Klumpp noting Kriegsspiele in the foreword as something GutsMuths "conspicuously skips entirely" ... as a side note, Jakob Glatz's 1809 short story for children, "Das Kriegsgericht"--available in French as "La Cour martiale"--likewise illustrates children playing "let's pretend" Kriegsspiele around the time miniatures rules were in development)
• William Fordyce Mavor (1796), "Game of Twenty" in The Juvenile Olio (this is "Twenty Questions," notably using the opening question of animal, vegetable, or mineral; see also the same author and game with a different example three years later but note that Huvier des Fontenelles described essentially the same game in 1788 as "The Twelve Questions," likewise beginning with animal, vegetable, or mineral)
• "Julius Cäsar" (1797), Spiel-almanach (contains a section on society games, including "Die Reise nach Jerusalem," a storytelling game with a single narrator talking about a journey in the manner of later games such as "The Traveller's Tour," "Stage-Coach," or "Family Coach" but giving each player a word, as in "The Impromptu Tale," to react to physically, as in "The Butterfly," only by standing up--perhaps gradually evolving into the musical chairs game, "Going to Jerusalem")
• Herr S***? (1798), Neuestes Tagebuch der Freude und des geselligen Vergnügens für junge Frauenzimmer und Mannspersonen (this has numerous games including "Advokatenspiel" / "L'Avocat," an early version of "The Disconnected Word" / "Cross Questions and Crooked Answers" in this case titled "Das Fragenspiel," a version of "The Twelve Questions" in this case called another "Fragenspiel," a kissing game called "Das Königsspiel" resembling several later card-based variants of "Spin the Bottle" in that participants interact as Kings and Queens, a list of 36 forfeits / penances in the section "Wie man die Pfänder löset," and a list of 111 riddles under "Das Räthselspiel")