Guess Who?

A worthwhile variant on Guess Who, the venerable board game that involves asking questions to determine which of 24 people’s faces your opponent has in front of him, is the unofficial Prejudicial Guess Who, in which questions must be about personality rather than appearance.

The challenge is to come up with questions that, based solely on players’ prejudices about the characters, allow you to whittle down the field with confidence. For example:

1. Has this person ever rung a sex chatline late at night?

2. When this person sees a plane, does he or she stop and point at it?

3. Does this person use, without irony, the exclamation: “Poppycock”?

The trick is to be sufficiently decisive to eliminate people rapidly without generalising so much that one accidentally excludes the actual candidate.

The other important thing, I discovered today, is not to play with someone who has wildly different prejudices. It was impossible to win against my friend T, for example, because he made judgements that I don’t think anyone else would. To see if I’m right or not, I’d like to conduct a little survey. It won’t be very scientific, I imagine, because unless my fanbase magically increases then the sample size will be too small. Furthermore, T is one of the few people who does read this blog, and so he may try to influence it, but let’s have a go.

I’ll post again in a week or two to say what answers I expected.