The game is called Fictionary. I love this game for many reasons. 1. It is fun. The whole family can play and enjoy it. 2. It is an intellectual game. In my family we love to say that one person is smarter than another, and this is a great game because you really get to use your brain and be creative and inventive. 3. It does not involve any crazy items to play.
All you need for this game is a dictionary (a nice big Webster one works great), squares of paper (scratch paper is awesome for this), pens or pencils (but for this game you want either all pens, or all pencils, not some of each) and people. This game is best played in large groups of people 3+. For this game, you have someone start where they are the round leader. This person looks in the dictionary and finds a word that they, nor anybody else playing know. It takes a few minutes for them to thumb through and find one. When they have found one they don't know (or didn't know before they saw it just now in the dictionary), they say the word out loud and ask if anyone in the group knows what it means. If someone even has a slight idea, or would recognize the definition if they heard it, the word is out and can't be used. In my family we have a doctor and a nurse, so any medical words are automatically out. Once they find a word that they can use, everyone takes their slip of paper, and the person who picked the word writes the dictionary definition down, or the real definition. The rest of the people come up with fake definitions. The idea is that you want people to believe your definition so don't want to come up with something too crazy. When everyone has finished, they hand their papers to the round leader, and they are read out loud. Everyone except the round leader picks what they think is the real definition. If someone picks the real definition, they get a point, if someone fools someone else into picking their made up definition, they get a point per person they fool. So someone can essentially get 4-5 points a round if they pick the right definition and fool a few people into guessing their answer. You can play as many rounds as you want, but at least enough to go around so everyone gets a chance to be the round leader. Then you add up the points to see who has the most.
This is a really fun game to play, especially with adults. I enjoy coming up with fake definitions and trying to fool other people. I remember one time we were playing and one of the definitions for a word (I can't remember the word) was the fur of a pole cat. We all chuckled and thought someone had come up with this crazy definition and so didn't pick it, and sure enough it was the real definition. Now we know there is such a word for the fur or a pole cat.