THE GREAT CONVERSATION GAME

INTRODUCTION
Glass Bead Style Game. 
The game links the Great Ideas with the Great Authors throughout History. 

VICTORY
The objective is to have the game go on for as long as possible or 
Until the players are satisfied.  If the game ends prematurely, it is because 
The players lack sufficient knowledge of the writers and their subjects. 
In this case the players need to read and study some more in preparation 
For the next game. 
The game also ends if either of the decks is used up. 

THE DECKS
There are 2 decks: 
1. The Great Ideas Deck
2. The Great Authors Deck

SETUP
Players sit around a table. 
Shuffle the Decks. 
Deal 7 Great Author Cards to each player. This is their hand. 
Pick the most knowledgeable  player to be the Leader. 

SEQUENCE OF PLAY
The top card of the Great Ideas Deck is flipped over and placed face up onto 
The center of the table. It is to be read aloud by the Leader.
This card is referred to as “The Idea in Question” (TIQ). 
Starting with the Leader and going clockwise, each player plays one of their 
Great writer cards face up to the table. Players in turn must state how their writer is 
Connected to the TIQ. Connections should include: Names of books the author wrote 
that relate to the Idea and what in particular the author had to say about the idea.  
The other players a group may judge if the answer is sufficiently informed. 
If a player is stumped, he may reveal his hand. 
The other players may look for connections with his Authors. 
If a player has no authors in his hand that relate to the idea (as confirmed by 
The other players collectively) he gets a free pass. 
If the player has an author but doesn’t know the connection (as pointed out by 
Another player) he gets a demerit. If the players as a group accumulate 10 demerits 
The Game ends prematurely.
Game play is concerned with the CONNECTIONS however players may feel free to 
Discuss separate tangents relating to the Authors or Ideas in as much detail as they 
Desire. 
After each player has taken a turn, the played Idea and author cards are discarded. 
The players each draw 1 replacement author card to add to their hands. 
A new Idea card is drawn to replace the previous one and the turn begins anew. 

THE GREAT IDEAS DECK CARD LIST 
Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy and Cosmology, Beauty, Being, Cause, 
Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, 
Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, 
Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, 
Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, 
Induction, Infinity, Judgement, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law,   
Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, Love, Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, 
Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, 
Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics,  
Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, 
Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, 
Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, 
Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny and Despotism, 
Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, 
Wisdom, World


THE GREAT AUTHORS DECK CARD LIST
Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, 
Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, Galen, Archimedes, Nicomachus, Lucretius, 
Epicretus, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, Virgil, Plutarch, Tacitus, Ptolemy, Copernicus, 
Kepler, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Calvin, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rabelais, 
Erasmus, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey, Cervantes, Francis Bacon, 
Descartes, Spinoza, Milton, Pascal, Moliere, Racine, Newton, Huygens, Locke, 
Berkeley, Hume, Swift, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Smith, Gibbon, 
Kant, Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitution, Federalist, 
Mill, Boswell, Lavoisier, Faraday, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Goethe, 
Balzac, Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Melville, Twain, Darwin, Marx, Tolstoy, 
Dostoevsky, Ibsen, William James, Freud, Bergson, Dewey, Whitehead, Russell, 
Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Barth, Poincare, Planck, Einstein, Eddington, Bohr, Hardy, 
Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dobzhansky, Waddington, Veblen, Tawney, Keynes, Frazer, 
Weber, Huizinga, Levi-Strauss, Henry James, Shaw, Conrad, Chekhov, Pirandello, 
Proust, Cather, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, O’Neill, 
Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Brecht, Hemingway, Orwell, Beckett




LINKS
Wikipedia	Definition