TGGEP

What Is TGGEP?

TGGEP stands for The Greatest Game Ever Played. It's a word game where you create small phrases out of acronyms. 

You'll occasionally see posts here on my blog that will be a "round" of this game. Feel free to comment on the posts you like w/ acronyms which fit whatever letters the blog post uses.

How Did It Start?

Back in my Freshman year of high school, my speech class would often enjoy this witty word game when our teacher felt like goofing off a bit. (He was an awesome teacher). To get the game going, he'd look around the room for some hint for what letters (often 3) to use. Sometimes he'd get them from license plates, as they generally have 3 consecutive letters in them. 

We kept the game going all year, enjoying everyone's take on the acronyms they produced. Some received high praise, while the "bad" one's were boo'd heavily. We often wished we'd kept a record of all the acronyms we came up with, as many of them were seriously good. There was even talk of making some kind sell-able game out of it. 

But alas, all that survived thus far was the name. In its own honor, I've shortened the title to just TGGEP.

How Do You Play? 

As mentioned previously, you need a set of letters to work with. Start w/ 3, as that's the easiest and often most fun. Once you've got your letters, make acronyms out of 'em. Simple, right?

Take the word "YES". One famous acronym for that was coined by my friend; it read "Yellow Electric Speedo". Or "TWB", which could yield "Taliban Workout Bus". The sky's the limit for what you can do w/ those letters, so long as you adhere to the rules as explained below.

If your OS is Unix-based (Linux or Mac, or Windows w/ Cygwin installed), you can use this small shell script to automatically generate some random acronyms.

#!/bin/bash

num=$1
if [[ $num -lt 3 ]]; then
   num=3
fi

for n in $(seq 1 $num); do
   printf \\$(printf '%03o' $((($RANDOM % 26) + 97)))
done
echo ""

Rules

As informal as a highschool freshmen speech class is, we developed a set of rules to help govern how TGGEP was played. 

• Define some kind of time limit for TGGEP.You don't have to stick to it, but mind the time it takes for your group to finish. If most people are done and there are 3 minutes on the clock, call it. 
• Don't use any words that could be used as suggestions for acronyms. If the letters are RED, don't say other cool words that start w/ R, E, or D. It tends to pollute other people's ideas b/c they'll fixate on what's already been said. 
• Suggested Corollary: Limit all talking. A round doesn't take that long. Silence helps people to come up w/ good stuff

House Rules

Every group has flexibility to determine what they'll allow or rule out. These are just some of the ones I and my friends developed over the years. 

You can use contractions: If you want to say "Had Not" but only have an "H" to work with, you can use "Hadn't". Abuse of this rule should be monitored, as it can border on cheating if you're not careful. Trying to say "I would not have" with "I'd'n't've" could be allowed, but should be heavily boo'd by other participants. In addition, if you know your acronym is pushing the rules, it's customary to announce this to the group. That way, you wan't be despised as much for cheating.

You can't use words/phrases that someone else has already used. How can you know what's available? You can't. (Not until it's too late, anyhow). Bragging rights and originality are on a first-come, first-serve basis. Whoever said it first gets the "cool" points. Along w/ this, don't always be the one to go first. Let other people have first crack, esp. when it's obvious that someone's bursting at the seems to go first (likely b/c they've one that they really like). 

The Legend

In all my years, the best acronym ever made was in speech class to the acronym "The Samurai's Tale" (a book most of us had read in junior high). I'll leave you with this:

The Horrible Eggplant Sadly Ate My Ugly Rat And I Said To A Lettuce "Ew"