20 Strangers; 5 'Articulates' - it's Chicken Shop ArticuDATE!

• Social experiment: Lure a bunch of prospective Articulate players one-by-one into a Chicken Shop. Get them to play Articulate; feed them chicken. See what happens.

(TL;DR: Articulate is the best ice-breaker in the ENTIRE WORLD. Especially when fuelled by chicken.)

Occasionally we like to try something a bit different out there in the big wide world.

We know that Articulate is the quintessential Sunday-afternoon-in-the-pub game. It’s a surprising staple of board game cafes, otherwise home to the more strategic and cerebral end of the board game market.

You’ll find it at Freshers’ dos, in church and youth groups, around boardroom tables for those popular team-building awaydays and at the funkiest of dinner networking events.

To cut a long story short, the great thing about it as a game concept is that it gets people interacting from the word ‘go’.

So, we wondered, taking just a tiny bit of inspiration from the magnificent Chicken Shop Date show, howsabout we put twenty strangers together in a well-regarded chicken outlet, throw them some Articulate boards and – well – see if ‘ArticuDATE’ might work as a concept? (See what we did there?)

And it worked. Oh boy, it worked.

Ice was less ‘broken’ than ‘smashed into millions of pieces’. New best buddies were forged in the battle over the spinner. And there were shedloads of arguments about whether definitions were acceptable, whether somebody had – in fact – already articulated the word ‘scooter’, and whether the long thing that a pirate looks through is definitely, definitely, definitely a 'microscope'.

It was a massively fun way of spending an evening, and taught us a lot – even though we know Articulate inside-out, there’s nothing quite like watching our games played in real-life situations.

Anyway, we can now heartily recommend the ArticuDATE concept as a TOTAL WINNER. Do YOU own a bar, chicken shop, tea room, village hall or other social space? Delight your customers and do something different with a few rounds of the game! And make sure you send us some photos after the event…

Thanks to the Chicken Shop branch in Hammersmith for hosting us!