I was at a New Year’s party the other day with some of my students, and they invited me to play a little game that is simple enough that I figured you might want to learn it as well.

As I’ve mentioned in a few other posts, New Year is the biggest holiday of the year in Kyrgyzstan and many of the other former USSR countries thanks to the forced secularization of Christmas during the Soviet era. Pick up Christmas traditions of trees and gifts, combine them with New Year, and voila, you’ve got an awesome holiday with no religious connotation whatsoever.

I was a little confused at first, because my students said, “Hey, let’s play ‘Новогодний Камаз!’” which literally means “New Year’s Truck.” Like, a semi truck.

“What truck?”

“The New Year’s Truck!”

Thoroughly confused, they sat me down to explain.

One person takes a simple object, in our case a cell phone, and gives it to another and says “This is for you!” The other person replies back, “What is it?” and the first responds, “It’s a New Year’s Truck!” then the recipient says, “Ah, it’s a New Year’s Truck!” before turning to someone else in the group and giving it to them. “Here, this is for you!” The second recipient asks the first recipient “What is it?” Then, the first recipient must turn to the original person and ask, “What is it?” The original person will say, “It’s a New Year’s Truck!” and then the first recipient will say “It’s a New Year’s Truck,” and then the third recipient will say, “Ah, it’s a New Year’s Truck!” before giving it to someone else, and the cascaded questions repeating.

Our first game, we just played going around a circle, which made it pretty easy to remember who you had to ask which question to. You continue until someone makes a mistake, like mistakenly telling someone “It’s a New Year’s Truck” when they needed to ask someone else “What is it?” Then, the person who first gave the gift gets to give a Truth or Dare type question/order to the person who made the mistake. In the next round, the person who made the mistake gets to initiate the giving of the truck.  The simple round goes something like this:

A➡B➡C➡D➡E➡F➡G

Sounds complicated, but it’s quite simple, and even though all anyone actually says is “Here, it’s the New Year’s Truck!” and “What is it?” it winds up being quite entertaining, especially when a few people decide to make life hard and do something like this:

A➡G➡C➡A➡C➡G➡C➡A➡D

In this case, the giver (A) and players G and C must keep track of the order in which they gave each other the gift so as to know which question to ask at which time to whom, and it gets intense very quickly.

We played a bunch of really fun rounds, stuffing our faces with salads, snacks, coffee and tea as we went. I got very good at being somewhere in the middle of the chain, and I was a source of endless amusement to people because I managed to play the game in Russian, which is not my language of greatest strength, to say the least.

And, now I have another fun response whenever someone asks me “What is it?”

“Why, it’s the New Year’s Truck, of course!”