Hunch hound

How to play Hunch hound

Pick one of six topics (animals, food, things around the house, clothes, ways to travel or sports), think of one thing in it and keep it in your head. The hound then asks up to twenty questions, choosing each one to rule out as much of the list as possible. Answer with yes, probably, not sure, probably not or no: the soft answers nudge the hound instead of ruling things out, which is handy for the awkward cases. Got one wrong? The back arrow undoes your last answer. When the hound is confident it makes a guess and you tell it whether it got you. It has three guesses in total. If all three miss you win. Every round is scored on how many questions it needed.

Tips

• Answer for the typical version of the thing, not the one weird exception you once saw
• Use probably and probably not for the awkward ones, they nudge instead of ruling out
• The hound is beatable, pick something on the edge of the topic
• Play it out loud with someone else, arguing over an answer is half the fun

About Hunch hound

Twenty questions is an old parlour game that survives because of the maths behind it. Every good yes or no question splits the remaining options roughly in half, so twenty of them can theoretically pin down one thing out of a million. In practice, people ask lazy questions and the game runs long. Hunch hound does not: it picks whichever question cuts the field down fastest, which is why it can feel a bit smug when it lands your answer in nine. Watching its confidence bar creep up after each answer is oddly satisfying, and losing to it once usually makes you want to find something obscure enough to beat it.

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