Botticelli (game)
Botticelli is a guessing game which requires the players to have a good knowledge of biographical details of famous people. The game has several variants, but the common theme is that one person or team thinks of a famous person, reveals their initial letter, and then answers yes/no questions to allow other players to guess the identity.
The game takes its name from the famous person having to be at least as famous as Sandro Botticelli, who is also the answer to the archetypal question, "Did you paint a picture of Venus rising?", referring to his painting The Birth of Venus.
How to play
build cool stuff and figure it out urself
Variants
Revision
This variant is useful as a course-work revision technique. Two teams have open book access to the same corpus, and one team (determined by a trivia question related to the corpus) chooses a character. The other team then asks yes/no questions to determine the choice. After ten "No" answers (indicated using the ten letters in the word "Botticelli"), the guessing team loses. Points are awarded as a function of the number of "No" answers.
Stumping
This variant is particularly useful as a pastime for long trips, since a single round can sometimes last over an hour. As in the standard version, the chooser picks a famous person or character and provides an initial (for example, if the chooser picked Sandro Botticelli, he or she would provide the letter "B"). The guesser must then think of a trivia question which can be answered by a word beginning with that letter, so in our example the guesser might ask, "What is the most populous country in South America?", the answer being "Brazil." The answer to the question must be something the chooser could reasonably know, not something personal to the guesser (e.g. "What was the name of my invisible friend when I was five?") or anything otherwise impossible to guess. If the chooser answers correctly, the guesser must think of another question. If the chooser is stumped and cannot answer, the guesser may ask a single yes-or-no question (as in direct mode of the standard version) about the person or character. Once the chooser answers the question, the guesser must stump the chooser again before asking another direct question. Generally, guessing the identity of the person or character counts as a direct question and can only be done after the chooser is stumped; however, in the interest of shortening the game, players sometimes will guess the person without having first stumped the chooser.
Games similar to Botticelli
- Vermicelli, in which the thing to be guessed is a food rather than a person.