Ever laughed so hard it hurt?

Last Friday, I laughed so hard so often that my stomach and sides still hurt on Saturday.

I have a circle of friends here at work. (Fortunately, since I know no one else in the state!) We celebrate the tres every month. This started last May when three of us went out on the third of May instead of the fifth of May. When June rolled around, we decided to go out on the third again - it made a convenient excuse. And so our tradition began.

This month, we had a game night at someone's house. Everyone brought food (and alcohol) and we set it up like a buffet in her kitchen. We began the evening's festivities by descending like a small hoard of locusts on the foodstuffs, then we retired to the living room. Let the games begin!

We played 2 games of 'Scene It!' - which is really cool. It's a board game with an accompanying DVD, so you divide into teams, roll the dice, and have to answer a question from a card (a la trivial pursuit) or answer something from the DVD. If it's an all-play, then it's a free-for-all. Sometimes they show a clip and you have to answer a question, sometimes you have to put movie titles in chronological order, and so on. The first team around the board wins. We had the movie furby on our team so we won before they made it a quarter of the way around the board. I think the fairest way would have been all of us against him, and we probably would have lost.

From there we moved to 'Thumper,' which is supposedly a game taught at girl scout camps. You sit in a circle, everyone had a sign. (Mine was smelly tepee, where I held my nose, then made a triangle over my head; someone else's sign was humping bunnies where they make the v-for-victory sign with both hands and bump their fists together; another sign was claimed to be the official American sign-language symbol for bullshit and so on.) You start the game slapping your hands on your thighs in unison (or approximately so), and the leader says "What are we playing?"

Everyone chimes in with "Thumper."
Then the leader says "How do we play?"
"Dirty"
"How dirty?"
"F*ck*ng dirty!"

Then the leader makes their sign and then someone else's. That someone needs to make their sign and then another, and so it goes until someone goofs up. This was usually due more to laughing too hard to move than anything else.

After several rounds of "Thumper" we played "Catchphrase," which is another hysterical game. You sit in a circle and there are two teams. If you're sitting like A, B, C, D then A and C are a team and B and D are a team. The catchphrase gizmo looks like a handheld videogame. You pass it around and when you have it, you have to get your team to guess the word. There's a timer built in and the team not holding it when the timer goes off gets a point.

From "Catchphrase" we moved on to "Family Feud" then to a drinking game called "Zoom" then to "Pictionary" [one highlight - "Obviously that is a horse with a group of f*ck*ng men in it!!!" to describe an attempt at 'trojan horse.' The other team got it when their draw-er sketched a condom and a horse-like creature.] then to a card game called "Oh Hell." This card game is similar to Eucher, but you bid on how many tricks you think you'll take. The first hand deals one card, the second hand two and so on. Points are awarded to those who are correct in their bidding. It's complicated, and I'll probably not ever be able to do the scoring on my own, but it was fun.

The evening ended late in the night, and our group has a host of new inside jokes. I don't think I've ever had so much fun in a single evening. Gameplay stopped at several points during the night because several of us were laying flat on the floor laughing so hard that we couldn't breathe. I can't wait for next month!