All this month we are looking at how board games can help us with exercises or development with our improv every week. We will be looking at the game that we talked about on Sundays and reflecting on it in Improv Corner on Monday evenings to see just what you can do with these and transfer the skills learned in these games into Improv skills.

This week we looked at the board game Cranium. One thing about Cranium is that it is a great party game and what else is a bit one big party? Improv! Cranium has a lot of fun moments to it and if you think about it improv does as as well.

I believe that there is so much to take from this board game that you can implement it into improv, especially short form. Think of all the fun style games you could use to remix into new improv games.

The first place to look is in the categories if you think about it a lot of Improv Trends tend to be made up of these sorts of physical activities, but how about trying to remix it and give it a fresh look.

How To Incorporate It Into Improv?

The first thing that comes to mind is that in rehearsal, you could break your team into two groups and compete in a warm-up game each team has to play around of each category and whatever team wins gets points. The overall winning team gets to choose the next parts of rehearsal.

If you think of the cards and categories separately, there is so much fun to have. For example, there are so many possibilities of game ideas with the humming song cards. You could base a scene on the song have a game where someone has to guess the song with Clues, you could make it a suggestion for the game sex with me, or even incorporate humming into an improv scene have someone hum the song and improvised the rap. Or why not step one bit further and have it as a barbershop quartet song.

The possibilities are endless.