In a story titled “A List,” from the classic children’s-book series “Frog and Toad,” Toad wakes up one morning and, anticipating a busy day ahead, decides to make a to-do list. At first, the list helps him keep track of his obligations, which include “Wake up,” “Take walk with Frog,” and “Take nap.” But when the list blows away in a gust of wind, he starts to spiral. Unable to remember its contents, he figures, “I will just have to sit here and do nothing.”
For the chronic list-makers among us, Toad’s struggle is all too relatable. The impulse to organize the world by itemizing it is a time-honored tradition, whose luminaries (listed in roughly chronological order) include:
- God, author of the Ten Commandments
- Santa Claus, maker of Naughty and Nice lists
- Homer, cataloguer of ships, in the Iliad
- Sei Shōnagon, lister of “Things That Make the Heart Beat Faster,” in “The Pillow Book”
- Carl Linnaeus, taxonomer of living things
- Maria von Trapp, singer of her favorite things
- Billy Joel, singer of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”
I could go on—but there’s something particularly satisfying about a finite, well-ordered list. This is the spirit, anyway, behind our new game, Catalogues.
The rules are simple: put a list of seven items into the correct order, according to a hidden theme, in five guesses or fewer. The first step is to decode the theme, which is hinted at in each day’s title. For example, the title “The ABCs of Anthropomorphism” might tell you something about the list’s subject (talking animals), and also its ordering rule (alphabetical). The second step usually involves some trivia: in order to alphabetize the list, you might need to know that “Frog’s best friend” is Toad, or that “Spider who weaves words into her web” is Charlotte.
You can see how the game works in this video tutorial, featuring the comedian Tim Meadows and his (admittedly not very helpful) colleague, Finian.
