How to play Ask a Hundred

One question, six squares, one guess

The question is public from the moment it is dealt and stays up for the whole forty-five seconds, because a table that reads it as the clock starts is a table where the fastest reader wins. The six squares are drawn face down from the start, so you can see the shape of the thing you are trying to fill.

You type one guess and send it. Everybody does it at the same moment and nothing anybody wrote is visible — not one word, not to anybody — until every slip is in and the whole board turns over together. If you have nothing after forty-five seconds the clock sends an empty slip in your name, and an empty slip is a legitimate thing to send — it simply scores nothing, and it is drawn under the board with everybody else's misses rather than hidden.

On the board pays by position, and nothing else pays at all

The top square is worth six, the next one five, and so on down to one for the sixth. Anything not up there is worth nothing, so the only decision in the game is how far down to reach: an answer everybody will give is a safe six if it really is the first square, and five or four if the board disagreed with you about which of two obvious things comes first.

There are no strikes, no stealing and no sides: it is one table and one board. Two people may take the same square and both are paid in full, which is the one rule that has to change when a round is blind rather than buzzed, and it is a good trade — nothing here is settled by who pressed a button first.

Nobody was surveyed

The hundred people do not exist and there is no data behind any board. What the six squares carry is one person's ranking, put in writing before you sat down, and half the pleasure of the reveal is telling the room that the fourth square plainly belongs at the top. A column of invented percentages would have looked like a measurement instead, and the next person to read it would have believed it.

Nothing in the deck can be revised for: no brands, no pop culture, no sport, no politics, no food that means one thing in Stockholm and another in Seattle. Boards are made of everyday things, everyday places and things people do. They are in English and only in English, which is a real gap rather than an oversight — your typing is matched against a board written in one language, so a table answering half in Swedish would divide on which language somebody reached for rather than on what they thought of.

What counts as the same answer

Articles and plurals are folded away, so a square takes the plural, the singular and the bare noun, and every square carries the other ways a room says the same thing. It will not guess at synonyms: a machine that pays out for the wrong answer is worse in a room of colleagues than one that occasionally refuses the right one.

Spelling is not folded, which is why the box leaves the browser's spellchecker on — a misspelling is a slip that scores nothing off a board it was actually on, and that is the worst possible way to lose six points. The board stays up for twenty-five seconds, or until everybody has pressed through it, and then the next question is dealt. Five questions in all, added up.

Questions people ask

Is this trivia?

No, and the deck was written specifically to make sure of it. Not one question has a correct answer: you are guessing which six answers are on a board somebody ranked in advance, and the boards are built out of the household, the street and the sort of thing anybody does in a week. Nothing on them can be studied for, and nothing on them rewards having grown up in one particular country.

Was anybody actually surveyed?

No, and the game says so on its own opening screen rather than leaving you to work it out. The hundred people are imaginary. Six answers were ranked by somebody who wrote them down, and a ranking is something you can read and dispute on the spot, which is what the reveal is there for. No percentages are printed anywhere, because a number nobody measured is a lie with a decimal point in it.

What happens if my answer is right and the board says it is not?

It happens, and it is the honest cost of matching a typed word against a fixed list. Articles and plurals are folded together and every square carries the other ways a room says the same thing, but nothing guesses at synonyms, because paying out for the wrong answer is worse than occasionally refusing the right one. A miss costs you nothing beyond the points — there are no strikes here.

Can I play it on my own?

No, and this is one of the few here with no stand-in chair at all. A machine filling the box would be doing one of two things — looking at the answers, or picking a word at random — and there is no version of either that is any fun to sit opposite. Three people is the floor, and that is about texture rather than rules: with two, the reveal has nothing to spread out.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Ask a Hundred?

No. It runs in the browser everyone already has open. One person opens a room, reads out the six-character code or pastes the link into the channel, and everyone else is at the table in a couple of seconds.

Do we need accounts?

No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address anywhere in the flow. You pick a name when you sit down, and that is the whole of it.

How many people can play Ask a Hundred?

3 to 8 — best with five. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Ask a Hundred take?

About 10 minutes, which is the length of a coffee break rather than the length of a games night. Nobody is the host in the sense of holding the controls, so a round finishes whether or not everyone is still looking at it.

Does it work over a video call?

That is what it is for. The game is on the screen and the talking is on the call — nobody has to describe a board to anybody, and the parts that must stay private stay on the server rather than being read out.