Twenty Questions

One player thinks of anything at all; the rest work it out with questions that can be answered only yes or no.

One player thinks of something and answers only yes or no. The rest have to name the , asking no more than twenty questions.

Twenty is neither an accident nor a stingy allowance. A question answered yes or no halves the field of possibilities at best, so twenty answers are enough to single out one thing in over a million. Games are lost almost never for want of questions and almost always for want of good ones: "is it a cat?" on the third turn removes one candidate instead of half of them.

The whole interest of the game is there. The neither obstructs nor cheats — the answers are honest — and the questioners are really competing against themselves: whether they can keep from guessing at random.

Where it came from

A parlour game known since at least the eighteenth century, one of those needing nothing but people in a room. In the twentieth it left the parlour: radio and television quizzes were built on its rules, and the traditional opening with the three kingdoms of nature came back from there.

Twenty Questions and situation puzzles

It is easily confused with situation puzzles, where the answers are likewise yes and no. The difference is in what has been set: here a thing to be named, there an event to be reconstructed. Hence the different questions — one cuts away attributes, the other tests explanations.

Players2+

CategoriesVerbal games

ObjectiveName the subject within twenty questions, guesses included.

Rules of Twenty Questions

The answerer and the subject

An answerer is chosen. They think of something and tell nobody.

An object, a place or a person will do — anything the others can ask about and could conceivably name. Something private, or known to the answerer alone, is pointless to choose: it cannot be worked out.

Questions

The other players ask questions. A question must be one the answerer can meet with yes or no:

Is it a person?
Can it be seen from here?
Is it bigger than a dog?
Do you eat it?

Questions wanting an account of something — "what colour is it?" — are not asked: the answerer turns them down, and no attempt is spent.

The answerer replies honestly and according to what they know of the subject. Where an answer really is ambiguous, "partly" and "sometimes" are allowed, but should not be leaned on: the game runs on answers that narrow the field.

Guesses

A possible answer may be named at any point, in place of a question. A spends one of the twenty attempts, so early guessing at random is expensive.

A wrong guess is refused and play goes on.

The allowance

Twenty attempts are given to everybody together, not to each player. Questions and guesses come out of the same total.

End of the round

The round ends the moment the subject is named. Whoever named it wins, and usually leads the next round.

If twenty attempts are spent without the answer, the round goes to the answerer. They announce the subject — otherwise there is no way of telling there was one.

Animal, vegetable or mineral

The older way of opening. Instead of the first question, the answerer says what the subject belongs to:

animal — anything living or once alive, people included;
vegetable — plants and what is made from them;
mineral — everything else.

The announcement does not count as a question. It removes most of the field at a stroke and shortens the game noticeably, which is why groups who find twenty questions generous still use it.

Worth knowing

How many attempts there are and what spends them is the most disputed point: in many groups a guess does not count as a question, and twenty then applies to questions alone. Asking goes strictly round the table in some circles and in no order at all in others. Answers of "sometimes" and "partly" are allowed by some and refused by others, who insist on a plain yes or no. Who leads the next round — the winner, the loser, or the next player round — is a matter of agreement too.