Subprime Mortgage or Hurricane

energizer
build energy and trust
can be combined with get-to-know-you questions

Players get in groups of three and form a “house” with the end players raising their arms in a “roof” above the inside players. There are three commands that cause the players to move:

Are there two people in the house? Therefore groups of four?

1. Eviction Notice: The houses stay in place, while the tenants run to a new house.

2. Remodel: The tenants stay where they are, and the houses dissolve and reassemble around new tenants. (We decided that the two members that make up each house need to separate from each other at this point, so they can meet more people.)

3. Subprime Mortgage: Everyone dissolves the houses and runs to form new houses; tenants can now become houses, and vice-versa.

In the traditional version, the “caller” of these commands races to find a spot, and the person left without a spot then become the new caller for the next round.

What Patrick added is that every time a new trio is formed, we stop and have them quickly trialogue about a given topic before the next “change” is called. Here are the discussion questions we used:

- Last place that you lived before your current residence. What’s one thing you remember about it?

- book/tv/movie that you have re-watched/read more than once,
- guilty pleasure of yours
- favorite place you have visited in the past few years,
- What's one time you had an encounter with a celebrity: who was it, and what happened?

Then bring one or two people up and ask the group to answer all the questions about them….or in Ritch’s suggested variation, ask questions randomly of the group like: Where did Heather live before her current residence? What is Bruce’s guilty pleasure? (only the two people who paired with each of them know the answers!)

From AIN, Miles Valentino of Playfair. This is based on Patrick Short’s version of the game.