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

The main variant described here is commonly played at Cambridge.

One player (the chooser) is selected to think of a famous person (the identity). This person should be someone the chooser is comfortable answering biographical questions about, and someone the chooser is very confident that the other players will all have heard of; obscure identities make for frustrating game play, especially with young players. The rule of thumb is that the person should be at least as famous or well-known as Sandro Botticelli, hence the name of the game. Fictional characters are acceptable, but can present certain difficulties. In some contexts, a non-famous person with whom all the players are familiar may be acceptable.

The chooser then announces the initial letter of the name by which the person is usually known; for non-fictional characters, this is usually the last name. For example, if the chooser chose Sandro Botticelli, then the initial letter would be B. For the purposes of phrasing questions and answers, the chooser adopts the chosen identity.

The game has two modes — direct mode and indirect mode — and starts in indirect mode.

Indirect Mode

In indirect mode, the guessers take turns (either in sequence or informally) to think of someone with the designated initial letter. These guesser choices do not have to conform to any other information so far acquired about the chooser's identity (e.g. male, non-fiction, still alive).

Each guesser asks the chooser a yes/no question using some detail of the guesser's choice. For example, if the letter is B then the guesser might choose Yul Brynner and ask, "Are you bald?" At this point, the chooser has three possible responses:

1. "No, I am not Frank Black." — The chooser has either guessed the guesser's chosen person, or has thought of another person who fits the same criteria. (Even if the guesser was thinking of the chooser's chosen person, a correct "No I am not" that names a different person is allowed, if it fits the questioned criteria.) The game remains in indirect mode, and moves to the next guesser.
2. "No, and I don't know who you're thinking of." — The chooser can't think of someone meeting the criteria. The guesser reveals their answer, and the game changes to direct mode. (If guesser was thinking of the chooser's person, then the guesser wins.) In a fun and challenging variant of the game played at Harvard, the game only moves to direct mode if, after the chooser fails or gives up, another guesser can successfully identify the subject of the question. This provides a built-in standard for whether the question posed by the guesser was fair; if another person can figure it out, they are rewarded with a direct question; if not, the game moves on (and the guesser who posed the question can later pose an easier question for the same person). A similar variant rewards stumping the chooser (but not fellow guessers) with the next letter in the chosen person's name (in this case, 'R'). This can make for quicker gameplay. Note that some questions are still disallowed: those that rely on private knowledge between two of the guessers (e.g., "Who did Ellen and I have lunch with last week?")

1. "Yes, I am Yul Brynner." — The chooser's identity meets the criterion of the guesser's question, and the chooser cannot think of anyone else who satisfies it. The guesser wins.

Guessers can use indirect mode to guess the chooser's identity directly (e.g. "Are you Yul Brynner?")

The bar for guesser choices is lower than that for the chooser's identity; it is not essential for the chooser to have heard of the person, or to know the relevant biographical detail, but guessers should not deliberately exploit this provision. The ideal guesser question is one where the chooser says "Doh! I should have gotten that." when the answer is revealed.

Direct Mode

In direct mode, the guesser whose choice enabled the mode switch gets to ask a series of yes/no questions about the chooser's identity. The designated guesser gets to choose which questions are asked in this mode, but may accept input from other guessers. Strict adherence to this rule varies.

Direct mode continues until the chooser answers "no" to a question.

Example questions and answers for direct mode:

• "Are you male?" → "Yes, I am male."
• "Are you unconnected with art?" → "Yes, I am unconnected with art."
• "Are you bald?" → "No, I am not bald."

If the chooser doesn't know the answer to a direct mode question, or the question does not permit a clear-cut yes/no answer, then the chooser answers as accurately as possible, and the game remains in direct mode.

There are some conventions for answering contextually inappropriate direct mode questions; for example, fictional characters are usually deemed to be dead if and only if their death is recorded (although Kenny and Sherlock Holmes are exceptions to this rule).

Winning

The game ends when a guesser successfully determines the chooser's identity. That guesser then becomes the chooser, a new identity and letter are chosen and the game starts again in indirect mode. If the successful guess was suggested by a non-designated guesser in direct mode, then it is normal courtesy for the designated guesser to defer to the other player.

If all guessers give up before winning, then the chooser reveals the identity. The guessers then determine (by majority) whether the choice was a good one (that is, they should all have known of the character and the chooser's answers in direct mode were reasonably accurate). The role of chooser then remains with the same player, or passes to another player (e.g. clockwise) as appropriate. It is considered bad form for one guesser to hold out after everyone else has given up.

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.

Sources

• http://www.col-ed.org/cur/sst/sst22.txt
• http://open-site.org/Games/Knowledge_Games/Botticelli/
• http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/~davea/games.html

Guessing games