50 Words for the 5th Kingdom

A tactile word-game of touch, intimacy, and fungus. 

A paper published in the Royal Society of Open Science suggests that mushrooms (or fungi) can generate up to 50 unique signals that are comparable to 'words' used for communication.

This is a two-player game inspired by this finding, where you try to communicate words to your partner using only their sense of touch:

1. Write down 25 words on scraps of paper.
2. Shuffle your words and hide them from casual viewing.
3. The First Player is the Sender, and will start.
4. The other player is the Receiver and must hold out their hands, palms up, and close their eyes.
5. The Sender takes a word from the Receiver's pile, and reads it silently.
6. The Sender then tries to convey the word to the Receiver using only methods that the Receiver will feel on their hands - tapping, pressing, heating or cooling.
7. The Receiver has one guess, and then the roles are swapped for the next round.

While the base game is for two players, has no scoring system, and uses 25 words each, variants include:

• Play with 3+ players - cycle out who is Receiver and Sender with each word guess.
• Make it competitive with scoring for 3+ players - each word correctly guessed earns BOTH the Sender and Receiver a point.
• Make it easier with a smaller set of words.
• Make it harder with a larger set of words.