Carnelli is a parlor game created by Jan Carnell, a member of the Metropolitan Washington chapter of Mensa. This game has been popular at Mensa gatherings for years, and has turned up at science fiction conventions as well. It can be called a "title association" game, like "word association" only using titles, such as those of a book, play, movie, or song.
It is played by a group of people who arrange themselves in a circle, with the nonplaying judge (or "Carnelli Master") standing in the center of the circle. The Carnelli Master starts the game by pointing to one of the players and saying a title. The pointed-to player must continue the game by saying a title himself, which must connect to the previous title in some way, such as having a word in common (The Time Machine and Time Enough for Love), having a common creator (an author as with Hamlet and Macbeth or producer or director), or other linkages of a similar nature — different groups of Carnelli players can vary in exactly what kinds of links are permissible. A notable regional variation is that in some gatherings, such as Chicago Area Mensa, a common actor is usually not an acceptable linkage; a link must be by the creator of the work, setting this game apart from many other association games and making it more challenging. A common rule is to allow pun linkages as long as they draw sufficient groans from the other people present — the link from Tequila Sunrise to To Kill a Mockingbird (pronounced "Tequila Mockingbird" for effect) is a popular one. The links The Night of the Iguana to "Iguana Hold Your Hand" and The Trojan Women to Condominium have also been done. A player followed "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" with "The Turn of the Screw," and it took several seconds of silence before other players voiced the groan that indicated that they'd realized that "Turn" is a homophone of "tern," a seabird.