Dan Coonan

“THE QUESTION GAME” AKA “SPLIT THE ROOM” AKA “NICKIES TAVERN GAME”

I love this game our family has played at holidays and vacations for thirty-five years now.  I feel compelled to get it all down on paper for posterity! :)  It has served us so well, and spans the generations quite nicely – from early teens on up.

I particularly love its origins – a bar table at Nickies tavern in South Bend in 1984.  This is just one of dozens of memorable bars in my life that occupy a special place in my heart and made me who I am today. :) I was out with a few college friends at my favorite college dive and we were looking for a way to play a competitive trivia game of some type where the participants made up the questions.  It’s easy to come up with a question no one else can answer correctly, and it’s easy to think of a question everyone can answer correctly.  The trick is to ask a question that exactly half the participants will get right and half will get wrong.  That is the premise here and the object of the game.

It’s played best with a large crowd.  Beyond that you need very little to pull it off – typically just several sheets of paper and pens.  It takes about five minutes to explain to people and about twenty-five minutes to play a complete round.  We are usually good for about three rounds when we play it in El Segundo at Christmas or Thanksgiving or at Lake Almanor.  The scoring is the most challenging part. 

We cut or rip the sheets of paper into a size that someone can easily write one question on.  Everyone gets one of these strips of paper and a pen.  The game begins with everyone scanning the room, getting a sense of the other participants, their likely interests and their ability to answer particular questions regarding various topics. 

Ask people to sit roughly in a circle and assign a number to all participants beginning with one.  Each person then writes down their number followed by a question on their strip of paper.  It may take as many as 8-10 minutes. for everyone to come up with the perfect question. It can be anything within the universe of general public knowledge – cultural, academic, literary, scientific, arts, sports, etc., and must have a definitive answer.  It also must be capable of answer by a google search in case of a challenge by one of the participants to the questioner’s answer.  Additionally, questions like “Who was my third grade teacher?” or “Who is my favorite cousin?” are not
permitted. You shouldn’t have to know someone in order to answer a question.  The question can’t be a yes or no question either, or any other question where the list of answers is binary (such as: “Did x happen in the day or night?” or: “Was Lincoln left-handed or right?”). It’s too easy to split the room with those types of questions.

Once all the participants have written a question and their specific number on their strip of paper, participants then  pass their question to the person on their right. Participants then quietly record their answer to the question which was handed to them on a separate sheet of paper or on their cell phone in a way that no one can see, and also record the question number.  Each participant then passes that strip of paper with the question they were handed to the person on their right, and the process continues until all the questions have been answered and recorded quietly by
all the participants.

At that point, one person collects all the questions, and another person prepares to keep score.  You receive points both by answering other people’s questions correctly and by asking a question that divides the room.

The person who collected the questions then reads question #1.  The group then one by one declares the answer they had privately recorded out loud (or just concedes that they got it wrong), after which the person who wrote that question gives the official answer.  Anyone who had privately recorded the correct answer to that question gets one point, and the scorer records that for each
participant accordingly. 

After that, the score for the questioner is determined. If there are an odd number of participants, say
13, the scorer calculates how many got the answer right, and how many got it wrong, without counting the answer of the person who wrote the question.  If exactly half the room answered right – 6 – multiply that by two, and that’s the score the questioner receives for that question – 12.  That’s a perfect score – dividing the room exactly in two.  The highest score for a questioner for a questions will always be half the number of participants times two.

The closer the questioner gets to equally dividing the room the more points that person gets. If instead of 6 people getting it right, either 5 or 7 participants got it right – almost perfect but not quite - the questioner gets 10 points for the question. If 4 or 8 got it right, the questioner gets 8 points. If 3 or 9 got it right, the questioner gets 6 points.  If 2 or 10 got it right, 4 points.  If 1 or 11 got it right, 2 points.  The questioner gets zero points for the question if 0 or 12 got the question right.

If there had been 17 participating, a perfect question would result in 8 right and 8 wrong, and a perfect score would then be 16 - 8 times 2. 7 or 9 answering correctly would score 14 points - 7 times two. 6 or 10 answering correctly would core 12, - 6 times 2, and so on.

The score for the questioner changes slightly if there are an even number of participants.  In that case, count the answer of the questioner in the tally.  If you have, for example, 10 participants, again calculate how many got the answer right, and how many got it wrong, and this time count the questioner’s answer in that tally.  If exactly half the room answered right – 5 – multiply that by two, and that’s the score the questioner receives for that question – 10.  If 4 or 6 got it right, the  questioner gets 8 points for the question 4 times 2. If 3 or 7 got it right, the questioner gets 6 points - 3 times 2. If 2 or 8 got it right, the questioner gets 4 points.  If 1 or 9 got it right, 2 points. The questioner gets zero points for the question if all 10 get the question right.

The total score for each person at the end of the round is the number of questions they answered
correctly plus the score they received for the question they asked.  Again, a questioner doesn’t get a point for answering their own question correctly unless there is an even number of total participants.

If there is a legitimate dispute about the correct answer, disputes are resolved by conducting a google search.  After that, if there still remains a dispute, take a vote of the participants to resolve it.  A vote can also determine if an answer that is not perfect is nonetheless close enough – someone writes “The Boss” when the questioner’s official answer is Bruce Springsteen.

Our family is typically split easily by science questions, Seinfeld questions, and some sports questions.  Sometimes we’ll include a rule that once a very specific topic is asked in a round, it’s off limits in the next round of questions.

I want to thank my brother-in-law Jim Pinkelman for taking the general concept and helping to really refine the rules and scoring mechanism. Its been a really cool game for the family for a few decades and the next generation loves it as well.

When I locate a photo of Nicky’s Bar I’ll put in at the top of this page.  I’ve tried hard to find one but have so far come up empty.  Then again, maybe it’s a good thing there are no photos…

“BOGUS”

What if you don’t have a large group? In our family of five we searched for a way to play this but its just not the same with a smaller group.

However, during this shelter-in-place phase we’ve been going through I came up with a new game for the five of us that’s kind of an off-shoot of Split the Room that so far the whole family really loves. We call it “Bogus” - or a less PG version of that word.

It works great with a family of five or more where everyone knows each other well. Again, you’ll need plenty of paper and pens. Just like split the room, every person has a chance to ask a question, but in this game that is done one person at a time.

The first questioner asks a question, and, unlike Split the Room, in this case personal and familial questions are fair game, perhaps even encouraged. The questions should be opinion-related rather than factual. The questioner may ask everyone to list their favorite actress or athlete, , favorite restaurant, movie, most annoying commercial, best musician, state they’d most want to live in, etc. Any possible opinion question works. Once the questioner asks the question, the others write an answer on the a strip of paper and then hand it to the questioner. On a separate sheet of paper or device, the questioner lists the answer she or she received interspersed randomly with bogus answers the questioner makes up to mislead the group - one bogus answer for every person submitting an answer. So if five people are playing, there will be four genuine answers and four bogus answers. Then all eight answers are read to the group. The four people submitting answers then have to match the other three responders with the answer they submitted. They score a point each time another answerer properly identifies which answer submitted was theirs. That incentivizes them to tell the truth in their own answers. The questioner earns a point each time an answerer incorrectly chooses a bogus answer as one that was submitted by one of the group.

That process repeats itself until each of the people have been able to take a turn asking a question. At that point all of the points for each round are totaled up. The one with the most points wins.

I’ll come up with a more coherent description than that in time.