The talented singer/songwriter Buffalo Rogers has created a new interactive songwriting game and it’s coming live on-stage September 6th at the Liberty Theater in Watonga. The name of Buffalo’s game is Jackalope Bones, and it is presented by the International Jackalope Foundation.

“The International Jackalope Foundation is a fake organization me and my fiddle player Rachel Reichert came up with at a show. And it just cracked us up, to plug the tip jar on the International Jackalope Foundation. Pretty much it came out of that, and Jackalope Bones is really just kind of something out of nothing, like the game is. It's all random and interactive. So, I wanted the name to reflect that, and the International Jackalope Foundation is my company name,” explained Buffalo.

So how does the songwriting game work exactly? Each game has a game board that contains five lists of words; people, places, action words and feelings. Each list contains 20 words and is numbered accordingly. Every contestant will get a roll on a dice rolling contraption that releases five twenty-sided dice. Whatever numbers those dice display will give them their word for that list. The songwriters end up with five words which are their songwriting prompt. Every contestant will get their own roll, and their own set of words. Buffalo builds every board from submissions from contestants who are playing the game.

“So, each contestant gives me five words for each column, and a lot of them I'll go through and if there's doubles, I'll use those. Just because it's kind of like a current theme in people's minds a little bit. Like if I have the word ‘ghost’ 3 times for 3 people, I use ghost. I take them and kind of whittle them down in the correct column where they need to go. How the word I think catches the most drag, meaning wise, the one that is the most versatile word. It's funny when you do the submissions, you see the people not wanting to put too hard a word because they know that karma comes to living the life of rhyme,” said Buffalo.

You can see a video explanation, as well as see a game board and the dice rolling contraption in this video.

“I came up with the game, probably the spring of 2023. Me and my kid got into D&D stuff, and they play it with a twenty-sided dice. The twenty-sided dice is just this really big game piece. So, I decided that I wanted to take five words, as a kind of a song prompt. And the objective of the game is to use every word in your song,” said Buffalo.

This won’t be the first time Buffalo has held the game, he did test it out extensively before deciding to make it a live stage show.

“I had a beta test group online with probably 40 songwriters in it. Probably had 25 songs written from it. And then a key element of the game is a time restriction on how long you have to write it. So, I also did it at the Bluegrass Festival in 2023 when I taught the songwriting class at OIBF. I had everybody write a song in 4 days. So, there were 6 songs that came out of that,” said Buffalo.

Now the game is making its live stage debut with eight songwriters: Scott Evans, Carter Sampson, Bailey Boy, AJH Hayes, Billy Hartman, Henry Merchant, Dan Martin and Morgan Reynolds. The show will be opened by Bickford. Rick Reiley will be on hand as well to introduce the game, and of course Buffalo will be there to host, The songwriters were given their words this week and are now working out their songs.

“I've kind of found you can't deal with too big a group because it is random and you do get repeat words. It's random, it'll give you some of the same things. I think this round we have two repeats. Which is pretty good,” said Buffalo.

You can see what words the contestants got and what songs they come up with on September 6th at the Liberty Theater.

“The venue, it's a really great old vaudeville theater in Watonga called the Liberty Theater. Honestly, I just love the look of this whole theater. We played a songwriter festival out there at Roman Nose about 10 years ago. We're filming it too. I think every time I do this, I want to film it. So, all these are going to be live tapings as well,” said Buffalo.

The doors open at 7pm and the show kicks off at 7:30pm. Tickets are available here.

“We were gonna charge $20 a ticket, but we figured since you was just gonna be using the front part of your seat, we'd only do $10,” said Buffalo.

In fact, you can win a pair of tickets to see the Jackalope Bones Live Stage show by commenting on and sharing Little Okieland’s post on Facebook. Make sure to tag us to we can see it was shared. Winner will be drawn on Friday August 29th.

Make sure you follow the Jackalope Bones FB page for more details and information.

And you can see a promo video about it here.

Buffalo’s Jackalope Bones Songwriting Game