How to play Most of Us

One question, everybody at once

"Name a vegetable you would not miss." Everybody answers the same question at the same moment, in private, in a few words.

Nothing is visible — not one answer, not to anybody — until the last one lands. Then they all turn over together and fall into columns.

The biggest column takes the point

Everyone in it scores. Anybody standing on their own scores nothing, and if exactly one person is alone they are left holding the chipped mug.

Holding the mug at the end cancels your win, so the last three questions of a game are entirely about giving it away.

The table has the last word on what counts as the same

The machine folds "Crisps", "crisps" and "the crisps" together and deliberately will not guess at "crisps" and "chips".

So anybody can join two columns with two presses, the name of whoever did it is printed on the result, and one press puts it back. First to eight points, or twelve questions, whichever comes first.

Questions people ask

Is this trivia?

The opposite. There is no right answer to any question in it — you are trying to write what most of the room wrote, which is a fact about your colleagues rather than about the world. Nobody can revise for it and nothing in it favours the person who grew up in the right country.

What is the chipped mug?

Whoever is the only person to give an answer takes it, and holding it at the end cancels your win. It is what stops the game being solved by writing the safest possible answer twelve times, and it turns the endgame into a scramble to be un-lonely.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Most of Us?

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 Most of Us?

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

How long does a game of Most of Us take?

About 15 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.