Acrostics
| No. of Players: | 1+ |
| Type of Game: | written |
| What you need: | pen and paper |
Goal
To solve riddles leading to words whose first letters spell out another word.
How to play
Acrostics are puzzles in which the leading letters in each line form a new word or phrase. In this game, one player prepares in advance an acrostic, in poetic form, for the other players to solve. Each line of the poem leads to a word, and the first letters of each of these words spell out the mystery word. The first player to correctly solve the entire puzzle is declared the winner and prepares a new puzzle for the next round.
If playing alone, the challenge is to simply create an acrostic puzzle.
More complex variations of this game include:
| Double Acrostics | – | a game where the first and last letters form two mystery words; and |
| Triple Acrostics | – | a game where the first, last and middle letters form three mystery words |
Example
Alana prepares the following five-line poem in advance for Barry, Crystal and Danica to solve. She tells them each line is a riddle with a single word solution, and that the first letters of these five words spell out a type of tree:
The apple of Daddy's eye.
It stops a boat from going bye-bye.
A Chinese fire drill.
Just beyond the window sill,
Sits Santa's little guy.
Solution:
MOMMY
ANCHOR
PANIC
LEDGE
ELF
(MAPLE)
Did you know?
Ticks are not insects. They are actually arachnids, meaning they are more closely related to spiders, scorpions and mites. And like many arachids, they attach themselves to a host to extract the blood they require for sustenance.
While some of the 900 known tick species carry potentially fatal diseases like Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, it is important to note that most tick-borne diseases are only successfully transmitted after many hours of feeding.
So it's extremely important to remove these mini-vampires as soon as you find them on yourself, or your dog or cat.
In case you're wondering, the images under the title of this word game form a rebus puzzle:
A + CROSS + TICKS = ACROSTICS
