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Dadaist Pursuit

A trivia game with the wrong answers

Dadaist Pursuit is an idle party game, playable with a deck of Trivial Pursuit cards, or any equivalent quiz game cards which have several questions on one side, and several answers on the other. It can be played by any number of people, and lasts for as long as you feel like playing it.

The game evolved through a few iterations at the tired end of a gaming weekend in 2008 or so, with Alex and Craig Tulloch, Ed Barker and Andrew and Geoff Ashley - we stopped short of an interesting scoring mechanism, because it didn't really need one.

Rules

Give each player a chunk of cards, and retire to armchairs around the room. Each player holds their cards in a stack, answer-side up.

Choose a random player to start. They turn over the top card of their pile, and read a question aloud from its question side. Moving clockwise around the room, each other player then selects what they think is the funniest answer from the card at the top of their pile, and reads it out. (If none of them are even remotely funny, they can just pass, but a non sequitur is usually better than nothing.)

The player who read the question picks the funniest answer from those read out, as that round's winner. Everyone then puts their top card to the back of their stack, and play passes to the left, with the next person reading out a question.

Scoring

If you want to keep score, the person who gave the funniest answer each round can put their answer card in front of them while the other players put their cards to the back of their stack. The random nature of the game makes scoring fairly meaningless, though.

Choosing a good question

A good question is one that has a large range of potential answers. Generally speaking, any question that can be answered with a noun (or a person's name) is good - even an abstract question like "Why did..." can usually be stretched to work.

The only bad questions tend to be the over-specific ones - "Which city..." will struggle for a funny response, and any question that asks for a year is either going to be unanswerable or dull.