Nature words for Alias — weather, plants, landscape

Weather, plants, landscape. Plays well at a cottage and on a hike.

A set about nature with the animals left out: trees and flowers, weather and seasons, mountains, rivers and everything visible from a train window. Words everyone knows and almost nobody can describe on the first try.

Why nature is harder than it looks

A cloud sounds like the easiest word in the world. Then try explaining it without saying sky or rain, and it turns out the ordinary things are the hardest to describe. That is why the set catches out a group convinced it has seen everything: there are more failed rounds here than such a simple theme has any right to produce.

Who this set is for

A group that thinks it has seen everything. The words here are familiar to all, and harder to describe than they look: the more ordinary a thing is, the fewer features there are to grab hold of. It plays well at a summer house, on a hike, and generally anywhere you can see the subject through the window. For children, only the easy tier.

Cloud

Works through the action: “this is what rain comes out of.” Short and unmistakable. Does not work: “white, in the sky, fluffy” — without the words sky and rain the description falls apart, and with them it breaks the rules. This is the best illustration of why the simplest words here are the hardest.

Frost

Works through the morning: “you wake up in autumn and the grass has gone grey.” Does not work: “a thin layer of ice” — the room says ice, sleet and rime. Season and time of day narrow the field here faster than any other feature.

Ravine

Works with movement: gesture downward and say “it drops away steeply here, which is why it is hard to cross.” Does not work: “a depression in the ground” — far too broad, and the room will work through pit, ditch and valley. Landscape is generally better shown than described.

Where groups go wrong

Nature invites description by appearance, and that is exactly where it breaks, because nature has no function to grab: a tree does not do anything, weather simply happens. Come at it through the season, the weather, or what people do with the thing. The second trap is plants: “green, grows” fits forty words, while “grows by the water and you weave baskets from it” gives the answer at once. The third is the hard tier of geographical terms, which barely land unless tied to a landscape somebody has actually seen.

Come at it through the season or the weather: "this only happens in autumn" narrows the field at once.
For plants, say where it grows and what people do with it rather than what it looks like.
Landscape is easiest through movement: "you climb down into this", "this is hard to get across".

Easy

Familiar words that land on the first clue. For warming up, for kids and for mixed groups.

sun, moon, star, sky, cloud, rain, snow, hail, wind, storm, thunderstorm, lightning, thunder, fog, dew, frost, ice, icicle, puddle, rainbow, warmth, heat, cold, chill, spring, summer, autumn, winter, morning, day, evening, night, sunrise, sunset, forest, grove, field, meadow, steppe, mountain, hill, rock, cave, ravine, valley, river, stream, lake, pond, sea, ocean, wave, shore, beach, sand, stone, clay, earth, soil, mud, island, waterfall, tree, oak, birch, willow, pine, spruce, maple, poplar, chestnut, lime, cherry, appletree, bush, shrub, grass, moss, fern, flower, rose, daisy, cornflower, poppy, sunflower, tulip, lily, dandelion, leaf, branch, root, trunk, bark, stump, cone, acorn, nut, berry, path, twig

Medium

Takes a few sentences and some imagination. The default setting for an ordinary evening.

periwinkle, bonfire, marsh, abyss, birchwood, ford, gale, grandeur, headwaters, pasture, migration, source, thaw, blizzard, reservoir, cascading, humidity, volcano, clearing, herbarium, estuary, depth, horizon, thicket, delta, arboretum, oakwood, rainy, bay, freezing, floodplain, reserve, undergrowth, westerly, verdure, downpour, meteorshower, emerald, canyon, karst, flowerbed, ladle, climatic, clover, hillside, vista, icefloe, bluff, ridge, avalanche, landscape, watermeadow, lichen, hollow, glacier, magma, mangrove, shallows, milky, subsoil, cornfields, lowland, oasis, skyline, precipitation, honeyfungus, islet, floodwater, greenhouse, mountainpass, sapling, snowdrop, flooding, upland, growth, brook, surf, chasm, hepatica, ray, wilderness, iridescent, relief, plain, spate, seedling, fault, snowstorm, knoll, mainland, slope, taiga, tundra, gorge, flora, brushwood, scrub, chernozem, tempest, tributary

Hard

Rare or abstract words. More failed rounds, and more laughing at them.

abrasion, azimuth, acclimatisation, alluvium, anticyclone, range, atmosphere, barometer, basin, bathymetry, benthos, biogeocenosis, biosphere, ripples, weathering, evaporation, clearcutting, reverberation, catchment, moistureexchange, geyser, heliophyte, geomorphology, hydrosphere, hydrology, montane, humus, degradation, deluvium, denudation, detritus, deflation, dune, edaphic, ecotone, eluvium, endemic, erosion, ephemeroid, salinisation, waterlogging, moistening, glaciation, zonality, isobar, isotherm, insolation, irrigation, karstic, acidity, convection, continentality, cryosphere, xerophyte, loessial, lithosphere, magmatism, mesoclimate, landreclamation, permafrost, metamorphism, microclimate, morainic, monsoon, surplus, nival, iceage, desertification, orography, palaeoclimate, pedosphere, petrography, plankton, platform, floodmeadow, polygonal, remediation, recultivation, relict, rift, sedimentation, seasonality, seismicity, sclerophyte, solonchak, stratification, subtropics, loam, succession, tectonics, thermokarst, transpiration, phytocenosis, photosynthesis, cyclone, shelf, layering, eutrophication, nectary, podzol