Seeing as how word games appear to be successfull here I just had an idea for another. It may work, I tried it with children albeit in simpler form. You start with a word, and the next one takes over a combination of 2 or more of the last letters from the previous one - place names are allowed. An example would be : crocodi(le) - Leice(ster) - sterling - ingest - Estonia - Niagara - race etc. The first word is thread