The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Board Game: Perfect Game for Writers

The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Board Game is the perfect game for a writer looking to exercise his brain, or a family looking to pull the noses of children away from the Wii or Nintendo DS. This simple game is based on taking those cartoons that have long been a mainstay of the New Yorker Magazine and adding new jokes and funny captions to them. For instance, in one of the cartoons there is a giant banana talking on the phone. My own caption for this one was “As a matter of fact, I am glad you said banana.” Not the funniest line that one might ever come up with, but it gives you an idea.

Another cartoon from this New Yorker board game asked for a caption idea based on the image of what appeared to be a South American revolutionary leader addressing a crowd where one guy has raised his hand to ask a question. My youngest son came up with this one: “Hey, Mr. Mustache, what’s with that mustache?” Very funny in context, I assure you. My own caption placed a dialogue into the mix. I had the guy in the crowd asking, “Will there be tea?” and the revolutionary leader answering, “No, there will be blood.”

Like any other form of entertainment in America, of course, the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Board Game is presented in the guise of a competitive endeavor. What that means is that there is a board and dice and a timer and little figures to represent the players. The way the game is played is that one person sits out from writing captions on each turn and it is his or her job to pick the favorite caption and then identify the writer. If you so desire you can then allow them to see if they can pick who wrote each of the captions. The more they get right, the farther along they move and whoever wrote the favorite caption is also rewarded. Now, the New York caption game is very fun to play like this, but it’s also fun to just sit around and pick up one of the cartoons and see who can come up with the best caption. The real purpose of a game like this is different from Monopoly or most of the other board game; it isn’t intended to inculcate the capitalist myth that competition is better than cooperation. The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Board Game does also not exist for the express purpose of raising a bunch of Donald Trumps. In fact, it might have behooved Donald Trump’s parents to have raised him on this game rather than Monopoly because then he might actually possess an iota of imagination.

This game is perfection for getting the synapses in the brains of growing children to fire. By being confronted with the idea of matching a verbal abstraction to a concrete visual clue, anyone who plays the New Yorker caption game, but especially children, are bound to benefit from the intellectual challenges presented, whether in a competitive form or a purely entertainment form.