MENTAL STRIP

There comes a time in every party, though, when someone wants to play a real blood-and-guts competition contest. Playing poker for pennies, however, is absurd, because nothing is at stake. This game puts the stakes back in poker.
    Mental strip poker uses regular poker rules for the cards but a different system for betting. The currency in this game is divulgences. Everyone is on his/her honor to divulge whatever is bet during a round. For instance:
    I deal. I call for an ante: "One black thought."
    Everyone can easily risk divulging one black thought, so everyone puts in the ante.
    Jayne has two kings and opens the bidding: "I bid a small sexual fantasy." Everyone stays in. But Mickey, with four hearts, says: I see your small sexual fantasy and raise you a grave doubt." Most of us wouldn't mind telling a harmless sexual fantasy, but a grave doubt—that's too heavy. We fold.
    Jayne draws a third king but keeps the bidding light: "I raise you a youthful mortification." Mickey has pulled the flush. "I see your youthful mortification and raise you a major vanity." Jayne wavers, but decides she has put in too much already to chicken out on a possible bluff. She sees the major vanity and loses.
    She feels sick. Everyone tells a black thought and a small sexual fantasy, but Jayne has to tel1, in addition, a grave doubt, a youthful mortification, and a major vanity. Jayne tries to squirm out of it by using as her grave doubt her inability to grow house plants. We reject this doubt; it is not grave enough.
    We remind Jayne of the time one of the women admitted as a major vanity, "I think I'm very beautiful," and as her grave doubt, "I'm afraid I'm not." Now, that was full payment.