I put one word in the middle of the table to get us started. The object of the game was to get rid of all of the words in your hand. In order play a word to the table, you had to look at the word in the middle, figure out some sort of conceivable relationship that a word in your hand has with the word on the table. For example, if the word on the table was "homeless" and one of the words in my hand was "play," I could put the word "play" on top of the word "homeless" and say that "homeless people might often be lacking in opportunities to play because they may spend more time on survival than playing."

The next person to lay down a card would then have to find a relationship connection between the word "play" (now on top of the stack) and a word in their hand. It's easy to see how the conversations and word pictures can go all over the place in a game like this. In the 20-25 minutes we took to get rid of all of our cards, we talked about everything from playing at your desk to dirty magazines to homeless people that have access to toys.

The takeaway for us was that relational connections exist everywhere. Walking into a room and feeling that I have nothing in common with anyone is hard to do now after a mental exercise like this!

How could an activity like this allow you to draw connections where you may feel none exist? Try this the next time you're looking to solve a problem. Write down words that describe your problem and see where the relational connections collide in the word pairs.