HAVE YOU PLAYED?
PIT
This shouty party game classic is nearly 120 years old and deserves a revisit
Words by Christopher John Eggett
If aparty game was meant to do anything to a group, it’s to engender electric giddiness, to loosen things up, to reintroduce ‘play’ into your meet-ups Maybe you spend most of your week being quite serious, and the weekend gettogether just needs a little spark to distract you back to being yourself. So before anyone asks how work was, you break out a game – something light, quick, and with the perfect balance of silliness and potential strategy.
While you might think that we’d recommend one of the many very good hobby titles that encourage this kind of thing, you’d be wrong (this month anyway). Instead, we’re suggesting a stone cold classic, first published in 1903, Pit.
WHAT IS IT?
Pit is a game intended to produce something like the feeling of being in the trading floor (said ‘pit’) of a stock market. There you are, shouting to one another, brokering deals as quickly as possible before the information around you changes. In the world of this new information, you’ve got to go straight back out and make another deal – ideally leveraging what you’ve just gained in some way.