Time's Up!

Nothing reveals the dark side of yourself, your besties and your dearly beloveds better than a game of 30 Seconds!

- By Anna Celliers

It was a South African called Calie Esterhuyse who developed this noisy and fiercely competitive general-knowledge board game, which is always whipped out on the stoep after a few toots too many or when the crowd starts getting bored with conversation, Monopoly or card games.

Playing this game normally breaks the company up into pairs, usually made up of those in a romantic relationship, in just a relationship of some sort, or siblings or lifelong friends. Two complete strangers (unless they are very intelligent or know a lot about everything) actually don’t stand a chance of beating those familiar pairs who know each other’s body language, argumentative tendencies, threatening skills, or those with many shared experiences. Radio presenter Darren ‘Whackhead’ Simpson from Kfm 94.5 in fact said that this game is “the biggest cause of divorce between middle-aged people after infidelity”.

As you all probably already know, you have to describe five different words or terms printed on a card to your team mate within 30 seconds, timed by an egg timer that is monitored extremely closely by the opposing team, who will begin to shout out loudly even before the last grain of sand drops. Getting all five answers correct seldom happens within the 30 seconds.

When giving clues, you are not allowed to use any part of the word or do any translation (for those who are tweetalig), but you can sing a tune or make signs, as long as it is not proper sign language. It is simply (or not so simply), a case of knowing, association, imagination, clues and even acting, with lots of physical actions thrown in.