Misinformation

From Ludocity
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Misinformation
Designer: Chris Hemmens
Year: unknown
Players: Upwards of 7 teams of equal numbers.
Stuff required: Pens, Paper and Guile.
Crew required: One.
Preparation: One day.
Time required: Spreading misinformation: 1 day, Quiz: 15-30 minutes plus ten minutes for scoring.
Place required: An organised gathering, e.g. conference.
Activities: Bluffing
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This is an untested game. Its rules are written, but it hasn't been tested out yet.
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This game is made available under an Attribution-Noncommercial Creative Commons licence. (What does this mean?)

Welcome to the impossible quiz. Don't worry though, by a stroke of luck the answers have been out there all day. The question is: can you separate the truth from the misinformation?

Preparation

One person needs to be the quizmaster and the number of teams needs to be settled on before the game actually starts. The quizmaster must construct a number of questions equal to that of the number of players (I recommend having a couple of extra questions in case extra players decide to join) and these questions should ideally by impossible for any of the players to realistically know the answer to. He must also marry each question to three possible answers: the correct answer, a wrong answer, and a very wrong answer.

The day before the conference/gathering, each team receives a card or email with one correct answer, one wrong answer and one very wrong answer, all to different questions. So imagine there are 8 teams, then an acceptable allocation of answers would be:

Player 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Correct answer to question 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Wrong answer to question 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1
Very wrong answer to question 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3

You can see that in this allocation, no two teams ever conflict on more than one question. This is ideal for the game although the minimum number of teams required to avoid double conflicts is seven. Once this allocation has been made, the order of the questions should be randomised.

Playing

Throughout the conference/gathering, each team must spread all 3 pieces of information (including exactly 2 pieces of misinformation) they have as widely and convincingly as possible. Remember, there will always be at least 2 other teams competing with you on each question. How your team chooses to do this is entirely up to you but you may to choose any of the following methods: Twitter, Flyers, Megaphone, Word of Mouth, or anything else you can come up with. All players are forbidden from checking which pieces of information are true and which are false. If someone can prove you looked up the answers, you won't be disqualified, but no one will like you and you won't get invited to parties anymore.

After a full day of spreading misinformation, all the teams congregate for the end-of-day quiz at a pre-specified time and location. The quiz consists of all the questions supplied to teams at the beginning of the game and runs just like a traditional pub quiz.

Points

Teams get 5 points for every correct answer.

If you write down another team’s correct information as your answer, that team receives 2 points.

If you write down another team’s wrong information as your answer, that team receives 4 points.

If you write down another team’s very wrong information as your answer, that team receives 10 points.

At the end of the game, the scores are tallied and the team with the highest score, wins.

Example Questions

The quizmaster has a huge penchant for what kind of cheese?

Correct: Edam

Wrong: Gruyere

Very Wrong: Stinking Bishop


What's the combined age of the UK band The Wurzels as of 30th July 2010?

Correct: 255

Wrong: 230

Very Wrong: 191