Thanks for writing this up! Sorry you couldn’t stick around.
A particular game I like playing over videocall is Breakfast Combo. I’d describe it as “20 questions, except half the questions involve solving philosophy of language on the fly.”
There’s a Breakfast Server, who thinks of an oddly specific Thing, and then says “Breakfast is served” when they’ve chosen the Thing. I’mma just quote this site that explains the rules:
How to play: Just like twenty questions, this game starts with one player (we’ll call him Josh) thinking of an item to guess. Unlike twenty questions, it’s best if this item is pretty specific. So some good examples might be things like this:
Your iPhone
A garbage sack
The shirt I’m wearing
A Garmin GPS
Some not-so-good examples:
Clouds
Rocks
A house
Does that make sense?
So, let’s say Josh is playing and he’s thinking of an item, and he comes up with his iPhone. Then the person he’s playing with, Paige, gets to start guessing, with the goal, of course, of guessing that the item is Josh’s iPhone.
In twenty questions, Paige would ask yes or no questions and try to deduce what the item would be from the provided clues. In breakfast combo, Paige just goes ahead and starts guessing things. They can start out random. It’s also good if these guesses are more specific rather than broad. So…
Paige: Is it a fireplace?
Because this is the first guess, this is what Josh says:
Josh: It’s more like a fireplace than anything you’ve guessed so far.
Then Paige gets to guess something else.
Paige: Is it a turtle?
Now Josh needs to decide if the item, his iPhone, is more similar to a turtle or a fireplace. Say he decides it’s more like a fireplace.
Josh: It’s more like a fireplace than a turtle, but, like a turtle…
And then Josh would fill in a clue, something that his iPhone and a turtle have in common. It could be anything he comes up with, like:
Josh: It’s more like a fireplace than a turtle, but, like a turtle, I’ve seen it.
So then Paige gets to guess something else.
Paige: Is it a campfire?
Josh answers the same way he did before.
Josh: It’s more like a fireplace than a campfire, but, like a campfire, it needs to be started.
Paige guesses again:
Paige: Is it a Sega Genesis game system?
In this case, Josh would probably decide that his iPhone is more like a Sega Genesis than anything else that Paige has guessed. So he says:
Josh: It’s more like a Sega Genesis than anything you’ve guessed so far.
This makes for a good rationalist game because it’s real cerebral. The Breakfast Server is often having to decide things like “hmm, is the International Space Station more like a bridge, or a boat?” or “Is the moon more like America or like communism?”. It ends up involving lots of fun discussion.
(I play with slightly different rules, where you only say “It’s more like a Sega Genesis than a fireplace”, and leave it at that. It might hypothetically be possible to go in a circuitious route where “It’s more like A than B, but due to unstable, on-the-fly ontological shifts, it turns out that an old guess C was more like it than A”)
Thanks for writing this up! Sorry you couldn’t stick around.
A particular game I like playing over videocall is Breakfast Combo. I’d describe it as “20 questions, except half the questions involve solving philosophy of language on the fly.”
There’s a Breakfast Server, who thinks of an oddly specific Thing, and then says “Breakfast is served” when they’ve chosen the Thing. I’mma just quote this site that explains the rules:
This makes for a good rationalist game because it’s real cerebral. The Breakfast Server is often having to decide things like “hmm, is the International Space Station more like a bridge, or a boat?” or “Is the moon more like America or like communism?”. It ends up involving lots of fun discussion.
(I play with slightly different rules, where you only say “It’s more like a Sega Genesis than a fireplace”, and leave it at that. It might hypothetically be possible to go in a circuitious route where “It’s more like A than B, but due to unstable, on-the-fly ontological shifts, it turns out that an old guess C was more like it than A”)
We played this and it was fun! Thanks for the recommendation!