Misinformation

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 gathering, each team receives a card or email with one correct answer, one wrong answer and one very wrong answer, all to different questions. If 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 gathering, each team must spread all 3 pieces of information (including exactly 2 pieces of misinformation) as widely and convincingly as possible - how your team chooses to do this is entirely up to you. There will always be at least 2 other teams competing with you on each question.

After a full day of spreading misinformation, all the teams congregate for the end-of-day quiz. 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

Playing the cut-down variation

In this variation, the game begins and ends with the pub quiz. The difference is that the spreading of misinformation for each question can only begin when that particular question has been asked. The question-master only continues to the next question once each team has written down an answer to the question being asked.

All other rules are the same with the exception that if anyone (including themselves) writes down a player’s wrong information as their answer, that player receives 5 points instead of 4.