Friday, December 31, 2004
Post-IT note game
Played the postIT note famous people name game. This is where everyone writes the name of a famous person, fictional character or just someone who is known by all the players on a postIT and sticks it to the forehead of the person sitting next to them.
Everyone then takes it in turn to ask questions in order to work out the name they have been given. Questions must be answerable by a 'yes' or 'no', and the player can continue to ask questions if they get a 'yes' response, otherwise the turn passes to the next player and they have to wait their turn again. Typical questions are: "am I male?, am I on TV?, am I British?" etc. A trick to maximise your chances of getting a positive response is to phrase your question to favour the least exclusive options. For example, (unless you have a suspicion that you are a singer) it's better to ask 'Am I not a singer?' rather than 'Am I a singer?' as there are more non-singers than singers and therefore you are more likely to get a positive answer.
On our second game, I had established that I was a British celebrity. I assumed, judging by the character of the person who had chosen the name, that I had been given the name of someone I truly despised. I tried to be devious by asking "Do I feature on the web site of 1001 people more annoying than Mick Hucknell?" (there is such a site, although it's name is slightly misleading as most of the people listed there are 'as annoying', 'even more annoying' or 'considerably more annoying' than Mr Hucknell). I thought there could be two possible responses to this question, either a decisive 'yes' meaning that this person was truly annoying, or a hesitant 'maybe' meaning that although I may personally despise this person, popular opinion was slightly more forgiving. However, I was given a surprise with a definite 'no'. This totally threw me, on the next turn I asked 'would I hate this person?' - yes, 'are you sure they are not on the 1001 people more annoying than Mick Hucknell list?' - yes. I was totally confused, it took half dozen turns before it dawned on me - 'am I Mick Hucknell' - YES!
Two games of something like this is normally the limit before the rules are mutated to keep the interest. So we played the PostIT insults game. The idea here that a name is posted on the head of one person who is then insulted in turn by the other players, the victim having to guess their own identify. We started with an easy one: "Your ears are massive", "Your girlfriend is the biggest minger in the world" and "Your mother is a bigoted old slag".
I then spoiled the game by posting the player's own name on their head, thankfully we only got as far as "You are very opinionated" (a borderline compliment in my book), he worked it out straight away.
