The Botticelli Game

We are playing The Botticelli Game on Twitter at www.twitter.com/botticelligame - this site is here to provide a place to read the full rules for those who don’t know them.

1. Botticelli is a game like 20 questions, except way better.  Rather than having a finite number of questions, guessers have an INFINITE number of questions - they just have to earn every one of them.  

2. The game begins when the “host” (in this case twitter.com/botticelligame) thinks of a famous person. This person can be real, fictional, alive, dead, or even a famous animal.  This person should be at least as famous as the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli.  The host announces the first letter of that person’s LAST name.  George Washington would be a W.   Folks with one name are an exception (Lassie would be an L).

3. The guessers (that’s all of you on twitter!) join forces to try to defeat the host.  First,  think of other people whose last names start with that same letter.  We’ll continue on with our George Washington example and think of other Ws -   Oprah Winfrey, Orson Welles, and Brian Wilson would all be fair game.  

4. You earn a yes/no question about the host’s mystery person by “stumping” the host with a bit of trivia about one of these new Ws, phrased as a (hopefully witty) question.  Note that your person does NOT have to adhere to any of the things you’ve learned about the host’s mystery person.

“Did you leave your successful daytime host job to start your OWN thing?” - oprah winfrey

“Did you direct the most revered movie in the history of American Cinema?” - orson welles

“Does god only know where i’d be without you?” -brian wilson 

5. If the host cannot correctly identify the person from your “stumper question,” you earn  a yes/no question.  If the host gets it, start thinking of some more Ws!  On the off-chance that you ask a stumper question about their person (“were you the first President of The United States?”), you would win a surprise victory.  As you learn more about the person through yes/no questions (“okay, we know it’s a real, dead, american man…”) you can feel free to just ask “Are you George Washington?” … but you risk not getting to use that person in a real stumper question.

6.  The host can play defense if you ask a very general clue.  If a guesser is thinking of Denzel Washington and asks “Are you an actor?” the host can successfully avoid a yes/no question by responding: “No, I’m not John Wayne.”  

7. if you think of a person who has a first and last name that BOTH start with the letter in play - here, we’ll say German director Wim Wenders - you may announce that your stumper question is a DOUBLE.  If the host is still stumped, you get two yes/no questions.  ”Did you direct ‘Wings of Desire’ - double.”  

8. Lastly, we will NOT be using The Internets to figure out your clues, so please don’t use the internet to make your clues and your stumper people too hard.  

Sincerely,

Sandro Botticelli.