Preparing the cards for Small Talk
You need a stack of cards, each of which is blank on one side and bears a word or phrase on the other. Each one is the name of a person, place, or thing, printed in nice big readable block letters.
How many cards? The barest minimum is roughly five cards times the number of players. This should be enough to ensure everyone can play one round without running out of cards. (The average number of cards used in a round will usually be around seven.)
But it's good to have more than that. People may want to play again, either right then and there or at a later party. The game won't work if people remember cards they saw in earlier games.
My own recommendation is that you spend the time to make up a nice fat deck of, say, 200 cards. That should get you through quite a few games. If the game catches on in your circle, you'll eventually want to make more cards. You'll have to judge for yourself how many you need, based on how often you play. I've found that very few players will remember a card they saw a year or more ago.
My own deck has grown to around 500 cards, and every once in a while I go through it and freshen it up, adding some new cards and discarding the ones that contain topical references that are no longer current.
I make my cards by buying 5" x 7" index cards and cutting them in half lengthwise. The resulting 2 1/2" x 7" cards are big enough to write on with a black felt-tip pen and will be read from across the average living room, which is all you really need.
Okay. So how do you choose what to put on the cards? How do you generate enough names of people, places, and things?
I think the most important thing is as much variety as possible. No one should ever be able to expect what will come next. One good way of generating a long list of varied things is to leaf through a dictionary and see what catches your eye. Some of the things should just be single words -- RED and ALUMINUM and OAK. Others should be more than one word -- MOSQUITO REPELLENT and FAKE I.D. and SOUR CREAM and LIFE INSURANCE POLICY. These longer phrases add a lot of color and fun, but you don't want them to totally dominate the game. So mix them up with the single words. About 50-50 seems right to me, but you can make the game easier by including more single words and fewer phrases.
To get some interesting phrases, don't always just put down a word you've spotted as you browse through the dictionary; think for a moment and see if it suggests an interesting phrase. If you see SPIDER, you might just write that down, but you might write down SPIDER WEB or BLACK WIDOW SPIDER instead. (But avoid using SPIDER on one card and SPIDER WEB on another; again, the cards should be as varied as possible.)
Include a fair number of abstract things, like FEAR and BIOLOGY and FREEDOM OF SPEECH and PERFECT PITCH. Make sure you have a good mix of easy and difficult cards, though; too many hard ones will bog the game down.
Don't forget the names of works of art. THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS and MONA LISA and WEST SIDE STORY and SWAN LAKE. Again, variety is important; I'd say no more than two of any category: two paintings, two musicals, two spoken plays (preferably at least one not by Shakespeare), and so on. Of course, make sure your examples are all very well known. If you're going to include a couple of operas, make sure they're ones like CARMEN that even non-operagoers will have heard of and have a chance of grappling with.
Include a few places. Include some nicknames, some places that no longer exist, and some that never existed at all. ROME and NEW ZEALAND and SILICON VALLEY and THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE and MUNCHKINLAND.
People are good to have. I like about 10% of the cards to be people, but not more than that. Don't make them all current celebrities, though; that's too predictable. Include famous people from all walks of life and all periods of history. THOMAS ALVA EDISON and MADONNA and KING HEROD and HARRIET TUBMAN and SOCRATES and CHARLES LINDBERGH. You can include fictional characters, too, but those are tricky because they need to be so well known that even people who haven't read the book (or seen the movie, or whatever) will have heard of them and know a little about them. You'll have best luck there with title characters: OTHELLO and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and HUCKLEBERRY FINN and THE CAT IN THE HAT. Characters from folktales and legends and pop culture are usually good: JOHNNY APPLESEED and HERCULES and UNCLE SAM and SMOKEY THE BEAR.
Finally, I think it's good to include some topical names out of the recent headlines: SARAH PALIN and MOUNT REDOUBT and STEM CELLS. These are obviously very time sensitive, though. My first deck of cards in the late 1980s included BABY M and LAFFER CURVE -- anyone remember those now? LARRY CRAIG might still make a good card if I were having a party tonight, but he's already yesterday's news and soon may have returned to obscurity. Every so often, I freshen up my deck by going through and discarding the outdated topical cards, and adding some new ones.