Coffee Pot
| No. of Players: | 2+ |
| Type of Game: | spoken |
| What you need: | nothing |
Goal
To guess a word from sentences that replace that word with coffee pot.
How to play
The gamemaster thinks of a word, preferably one that is homographic (i.e., a word that has two or more meanings, like down), or one that is homophonous (i.e., a word that sounds like another word but has a different meaning, like break or brake). The other players try to guess the secret word by asking questions of the gamemaster, who answers in sentences that replace the secret word with the word coffee pot or some other agreed upon substitute. After a player asks a question and hears the response, he can make one guess. Correct guesses earn a player one point and elevate him to gamemaster for the next round. After a sufficient number of rounds, an overall winner can be declared based on the total number of points accumulated by each player. To ease gameplay, a straightforward noun can be selected for the secret word.
Example
| Alvin: | I have a secret word. Ask me questions and try to guess it. |
| Bijou: | Why do people like you? |
| Alvin: | Because my coffee pot looks fabulous. |
| Carie: | Are you alive? |
| Alvin: | Coffee pots are alive unless pulled out by the roots. |
| Donna: | Are you edible raw? |
| Alvin: | No, but cooked coffee pots are delicious. |
And so on, until HAIR/HARE is guessed.
Did you know?
The world's first webcam watched a coffee pot. That's right, a coffee pot. Why? Well, apparently whenever somebody brewed coffee in the computer lab at the University of Cambridge in 1991, the precious drink would go fast. This resulted in too many wasted trips down a corridor to an empty coffee pot.
So the computer programmers hooked up a camera that updated a new image of the coffee pot to their computer screens about once every 20 seconds. This allowed them to monitor coffee levels without getting up.
Incidently, this was a couple years before web browsers gained the ability to display images. At that point, the camera was connected to the internet and voilà: the internet webcam was born!
