A New Game

While it's fresh, I thought I would fill you all in on our New Years Eve activities. I warn you, this story is not for the fainthearted. It involves tastes, the like of which, you wish you had never tasted, and the use of substances, illegal in the United States of America, and a pair of striped pyjamas.

It really all began with a trip to the Jelly Belly factory, a day before New Years Eve.

 

We didn't do the tour because there was no production going on and the line was out of the door... so, we just sampled :) 

Thanks to the geniuses at Jelly Belly who, inspired by Harry Potter and the goodies found at Hogwarts, provided us with jelly beans that were so disgusting to the taster but so hilarious to those watching the taster grimace in horror, we just HAD to make a game out of them. This is what we played during the last hours of 2010.

"Puke-phrase" (inspired by that instinct all children have to mix the most terrible concoction ever and make their siblings drink it for their own amusement)

Equipment needed:

One game of Catchphrase

Two boxes of "Bean Boozled" jelly beans

Begin with a normal game of catch phrase, except, when the buzzer ends on a player and the round is lost, that player must be given a bean from the packet of Bean Boozled. They must eat the bean while the others look on and determine the flavor of the bean. The bean must be kept in the mouth for at least 10 seconds before spitting out.

Now, to understand the challenge that the players face when found holding the catchphrase disk on the losing buzzer I think you need to understand what kind of "flavors" they were up against.

 

*Canned Dog Food  *Barf  *Baby Wipes  *Rotten Egg  *Centipede  *Booger  *Pencil Shavings  *Moldy Cheese  *Toothpaste  *Skunk Spray

 

The fun thing about the "bamboozled" packets though is that they have two identical looking beans in each color and one of them is delicious, like peach or strawberry, and one of them is disgusting, like barf or centipede. You just don't know which is which.

Biting into a jelly bean that could possibly taste like skunk spray and finding out it is licorice is such a relief. In fact, it's positively delightful. But biting into a jelly bean that you've never tasted before and finding out it tastes like rotten egg. Having that taste/smell fill your nose and spread throughout your entire mouth, the stickiness of the jelly bean making sure the flavor gets stuck into your teeth for as long as it takes you to lose another round and gamble another jelly bean to replace the flavor... well, it's pretty bad.

Here's how it played out for D&H:

Hayley: Moldy Cheese, Barf, Rotten Egg, Centipede,

Derrald: Skunk Spray, Booger, Rotten Egg, Barf, Canned Dog Food, Pencil Shavings

Derrald definitely got a lot more "toothpaste" (I never got a single one) and the first person to sample the "canned dog meat" (CDM) was Mum. Brendan is the one who gave her the bean and because we'd been playing for quite a long time without ever coming across a CDM he looked at the red color and thought it was Strawberry Jam or Centipede (which we'd had quite a few of). Mum was chewing away and confusedly said "It tastes like meat". "Strawberry Jam or Centipede" we repeated to her. "But it tastes like meat!" she cried. "OH!!" Brendan looked at the box - sure enough... Mum had just chowed down on a jelly bean that tasted like canned dog meat. The smell of her breath confirmed it. Nasty.

     

Okay. I know I promised you a tale involving striped pyjamas and illegal substances but that part of the story will have to wait for next time. I would like to end with a shout out to the Kuhns for introducing us to Catch Phrase in the first place and to Jelly Belly for being so incredibly accurate with their disgusting flavored jelly beans.