Taboo

A few days ago, Leon came to us with a game he invented. The game was basically “guess the word,” and Leon was surprisingly good at it! (I guess Minh must have passed down the gene for a love of Taboo!) That night, I bought him the game “Banned,” which is basically a combination of Charades and Taboo.

We’ve played a couple times since then, with Leon giving the clues each time. He’s great at acting out the clues, but to challenge him a little more, Minh brought out Taboo and prompted him to try verbally giving clues before resorting to acting it out. We both figured it would expand his vocabulary if he challenges himself to explore different ways to say a common word. 

After drawing a card, he gave a clue that we were able to narrow down immediately to being related to baseball. Since Taboo was more difficult than Banned, we allowed him to read one word from the list of off-limits words. He read “house.” 

So related to baseball and a house… Leon was also pointing down, so we started to narrow the guesses down to something related to the ground. Field? No. Lawn? No. Mound? No.

After a few minutes, we gave up. He had been writing on a piece of paper, and we weren’t getting anywhere.

He showed us the card: Basement. 

In hindsight, I was almost more confused by his clues. I asked him if he even knew what a basement was, and he said no.

He showed us the paper he was drawing on. It was a baseball field with the four bases marked. Basement. Ohhh…

After that, we decided maybe Taboo was a little too much for the time being!