Minister's Cat

Goal

To recall and add to a growing alphabetical list of words.

How to play

The first player says "The minister's cat is an ___ cat" where the sentence is completed with an adjective that begins with the letter A. The second player then repeats the completed sentence, but adds another adjective that also begins with A. Each successive player repeats the sentence with the previous list of adjectives and adds a new adjective for the same letter in the alphabet. Once all players have contributed an A-letter adjective, they move on to think of B-letter adjectives and so on, each new round being devoted to the next letter in the alphabet. Any player who cannot remember the previous adjectives used in the round, or who cannot think of a suitable adjective, drops out of the game. The last player left is the winner.

Players can make the game easier by removing the need to recall the previous list of adjectives in any given round. Or they can make the game more difficult by requiring players to also recall adjectives used in all previous rounds.

Alternatively, players think of just one adjective per letter of the alphabet. So the first player completes the sentence with an A-letter adjective, the second player with a B-letter adjective, and so on. The same 'drop out' rules apply and players may, or may not, be required to recall the previous adjectives.

Another version of this game is I Love My Love.

Example

The players agree that each round will be devoted to a single letter. Any player who cannot correctly recall all the previous adjectives, or who cannot think of new adjective, loses the game. The last player left is the winner.

And so on...

Did you know?

The Minister's Cat dates back to the Victorian era. The Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign in Great Britain, lasting from 1837 to 1901. It was during these years that this game was first popularized. People would often play in their parlour – basically a sitting-room in a house used for receiving guests. This is why the Minister's Cat is usually called a Victorian parlour game.

This memory game seems to have faded in popularity during the first half of the 20th century. But it had a resurgence after it featured in the 1970 musical film Scrooge which was, of course, an adaptation of Charles Dickens' Victorian era novella A Christmas Carol, which was published in 1843.

More recently, Frasier Crane tries to convince his guests to play a "spirited game of the Minister's Cat" in the 1999 "The Fight Before Christmas" episode of Frasier. And the animated characters Louis, her father, and others sing a Minister's Cat song in the 2019 "Absolutely Babulous" episode of Family Guy.

Did you know?

There are approximately 125,000 adjectives in the English language. That's a lot of words to consider when looking to perfectly describe that jaw-dropping sunset before us.

This estimate is based on the fact that about a quarter of the words we use are adjectives – and if we assume there are 500,000 total words. That total is based on the number of entries found in unabridged dictionaries like Webster's Third New International Dictionary.

Incidently, this means there are approximately 250,000 nouns, 70,000 verbs, and 55,000 adverbs, exclamations, conjunctions and prepositions.

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