Ideograph 2008

Ideograph is a party game about ideographic / pictographic association. Players create meanings for combinations of symbols (graphemes) based on associations of the (combined) meanings of those symbols. The player that comes up with the best / most creative / most humorous / most plausible explanation of the meaning of a combination of symbols wins that round. This is decided by means of voting. Hence, whether plausibility or humor is prioritized depends on the players and the situation.

The game is based loosely on the structure of Chinese characters. The selection of symbols (card/graphemes) in the game is based partly on frequently occurring 'radicals' and other graphemes in Chinese characters, but also on Anna Wierzbicka’s theory of semantic primes (natural semantic metalanguage). The shapes of the symbols are for the most part completely unrelated to those found in Chinese characters. Ideograph is not intended to be an educational game or to be helpful in learning Chinese characters. It is merely intended to be fun (within the right context), although playing with language in this way might be a rather geeky type of fun.