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Guessing Games with words

The object of word guessing games is for players to guess a word or phrase that has been chosen by someone else.

• In the Manner of the Word: the group of players sends one person out of the room while they choose an adverb, say happily. When the guesser comes back in, he or she asks the others to carry out various actions ‘in the manner of the word’ –‘Dance in the manner of the word’.

In a variation called Dumb Crambo, the guesser asks questions which must be answered with a rhyming word: suppose the word is chair, the guesser might ask:

             Is it an animal?

            No it’s not a mare.

            Is it food?

            No it’s not a pear. ….

In another version, known as Coffeepot, the answers have to substitute the word coffeepot for the target word, say banana:

            Is it big?

            No coffeepots are quite small

            Can you buy it in a shop?

            Yes many shops sell coffeepots.

• Charades, known in the Royal Family as The Game and on television as Give us a Clue: a player silently acts out phrases The more the merrier, film titles Rear Window etc for the rest of the group to guess. Various conventional gestures are sometimes allowed to show if it is a film, a book or whatever, how many words it has, if it is abbreviated, what the first letter of the word is, and the like.
• Twenty Questions alias Animal, Vegetable or Mineral on the radio: people guess a mystery word using up to 20 questions answerable by Yes or No. The only clue given is whether the word is animal, vegetable or mineral (and sometime abstract).

            It’s vegetable.

            Can it be eaten?

            Yes.

            Does it have to be cooked?

            No …

In the variant called Botticelli the player thinks of a famous person, say Johnny Depp and announces the first letter D. The others ask him or her questions and she or he have to reply with the name of another famous person starting with the same letter that the questioner might be thinking of:

                        Are you a politician?

                        No I’m not Alistair Darling..

                        Have you written books?

                        No I’m not Charles Dickens.

In another variant called Twenty Answers, players provide a series of twenty statements that might be answers to questions about the target word and the player has to guess the word:

                        It’s human.

                        It’s part of the  body.

                       It’s small.

Twenty Questions exploits the type of meaning that uses a set of plus or minus features – edible [+], cooked [-], as discussed on page 000; can you narrow down the choices to just one word by having 20 yes (+) or no (-) pieces of information? For this reason it is easy to devise a computer program that ‘learns’ from examples that are fed into it and soon becomes almost unbeatable – a commercial version is on sale.