Focus Group

A party game for any number of players

  1. This game is a variant on the standard "Who Am I" party icebreaker. Write the names of specific well-known people, animals or things on post-it notes. It is important that the things selected have strong, easily characterisable traits. The things must be named specific instances, not general types. For example,"Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" is OK, but a "A Volkswagon Beetle" is not.
  2. Stick a note on the forehead of each guest.
  3. Each guest must then attempt to guess who or what they are. They do this by asking focus group-type questions of the surrounding people; for example "if I were a car, what kind of car would I be?", or "if I were a British politician, who would I be?".
  4. If the questioner asks about a category that her character could reasonably be regarded as a member of, her neighbours tell her so. For example "if I were a comic book character, who would I be?" "You are a comic book character."
  5. The Subsets Rule: To make things more interesting, the questioner may not choose a category that is a subset of a category that she has already asked about. In the example above, the questioner could not go on to ask "if I were a comic book hero, who would I be?"
  6. The Rule of 100: The questioner should not make the categories too general - for example "if I were a living person, who would I be?" If the neighbours reckon that they could collectively think of more than 100 examples of the category, they can demand (politely) that the questioner be more specific.
  7. After each question, the questioner can have one guess at who they are.
  8. The game ends when everyone has guessed or has given up.

Mark Tolley
1st December 1998