Hello internet! This week, my brother-in-law and his girlfriend have come visit for a couple of days and they've teached us a nice, simple game to play in small groups, which they call frequency. I want to teach it to you in this short entry.

Introducing the rules

Let's say you're a group of four people. One of you, the guesser, closes their eyes while the rest agree on a number from 1 to 10, which the guesser will have to... you guessed it, guess!

To guess the number, the guesser asks their three friends up to two questions each to get information about the number. The questions are not about the number's properties, however. The guesser asks one friend about a category of things and the answer is an item in that category the answerer would mark with the number they're thinking.

For example, if the guesser asked me about a film and I was thinking of number 8, I would answer The Day The Earth Stood Still. However, I would answer Gran Torino if I was thinking of number 10 and David Lynch's Dune if I was thinking of number 1. You may not agree with these marks, but the point of the game is that the guesser has to try to understand how the answerers feel about their answers to approximate the number.

After at most six questions, the guesser says what they think the number is and their friends tell them if they were right. Simple as pie! You can also follow up with conversation regarding the markings to know each other better.

Possible variations

The frequency game can change in two ways: the number of people you're playing with and your relationship to them.

Regarding the number of people, I presented the rules for a group of four as that's what we've played this past few days. The game probably works best in small groups and five to seven maximum questions sounds the most reasonable if you don't want the guesser to gather too much information. If you are in a bigger group, you can agree that the guesser can ask a maximum number of questions but, say, must ask every person at least once. You can experiment a bit and see what works for you!

The information you can get also depends on how well you know your group. You can ask very specific things to people very close to you and more generic things to people you don't know so well. As I said earlier, you should use your questions as a chance to get to know each other better. Sometimes, asking a very close person can give you a lot of information. For example, I once asked the first question to Ari about TV series. She said The Sopranos, so I immediately knew it was a 10!

And that's it! I hope you enjoy playing this game as much as I did these days and will continue enjoying with friends.

Thank you for reading and have a great day!