Category Naming Games: A History From Stadt, Land, Fluss to Scattergories

Few games are as easy to explain as this one. Choose a category, or a letter, or both. Start a clock. Name as many things as you can before it stops, and score the ones nobody else thought of. It needs no board, no cards and no equipment beyond a pencil, which is probably why it turns up in so many countries under so many names, and why psychologists picked up the same task as one of their most useful tests. Krillocity is the newest version of it: a live race where everyone names answers to one prompt against a 30-second clock.

This is the story of the speed-naming game, from kitchen tables to boxed games, television studios and the lab.

In German-speaking countries the game is Stadt, Land, Fluss: city, country, river. Players rule a sheet into columns headed with those three categories, often adding others such as a name, an animal, a plant or a job. One player recites the alphabet silently in their head, another says Stopp, and the letter reached is the round's letter. Everyone then races to fill a row with words starting with it, and the first to finish calls a halt.

The scoring is what makes it a game rather than a quiz. In the usual rules an answer earns 10 points, but only 5 if another player wrote the same thing, and 20 if you were the only player with any answer in that column at all. The common answer is worth less because it is common. Nobody knows who invented it, and it has been passed on by families and schools rather than any publisher.

Travel and the game changes its name and keeps its rules:

• France plays le petit bac, the little baccalauréat, a joke about it being a small exam.
• Italy plays nomi, cose, città: names, things, cities.
• Spain and Latin America play it as Basta or Stop, after the word shouted when someone finishes, and in Argentina as Tutti Frutti.
• Brazil knows it as Stop or Adedonha.
• Turkey plays İsim Şehir Hayvan: name, city, animal.
• Iran plays Esm-o-Famil, first name and surname, after its opening columns.
• Israel plays Eretz Ir: country, city.
• Poland plays Państwa-miasta: countries and cities.

The categories in a name tell you what each culture thought worth knowing, but the shape never varies: a letter, a set of columns, a race, and a penalty for answers you share.

English-speaking families have their own versions, usually just called Categories. Old party-game books describe one called Guggenheim, played on a grid with the categories down one side and the letters of a chosen word across the top, so every square is a category and a letter at once.

The game finally came in a box in 1988, when Milton Bradley published Scattergories. It kept the kitchen-table idea and added hardware: lists of twelve categories, a twenty-sided die printed with letters, and a timer. Roll the letter, start the timer, and fill in all twelve.

The scoring took Stadt, Land, Fluss's idea to its limit. When the timer stops, players read their answers aloud, and any answer someone else also wrote is crossed out for both of them. Only unique answers score. The game made a virtue of the argument over whether an answer counts, which is half the fun of any version, and became one of the best known party games of its era. In 1993 it even became a short-lived NBC game show, hosted by Dick Clark.

What Scattergories could not do was judge rarity beyond the table. An answer only counts as rare if the three or four people you are playing with did not think of it. Against a different table, the same answer might be the one everybody writes.

Broadcasters found their own versions of the naming race.

• Just a Minute, on BBC Radio since 1967, asks panellists to talk for a minute on a subject without hesitation, repetition or deviation. It is not a naming game, but its ban on repetition is the same rule every naming game has: say it twice and it does not count.
• The $10,000 Pyramid, from 1973, ends with the Winner's Circle, in which one partner rattles off things that belong to a category while the other tries to name the category itself, against a one-minute clock.
• Family Feud, from 1976, built a whole show on what a hundred people said, and its quick-fire final round, Fast Money, asks players to name answers against the clock.
• Countdown, which opened Channel 4 in 1982, gives its contestants 30 seconds to make the longest word they can from a set of letters, with its famous clock ticking down over them.
• Pointless, from 2009, flipped the survey over. Its hundred people are given 100 seconds to name as many correct answers as they can, and contestants score best with the answer none of them gave.

Pointless is the clearest ancestor of rarity scoring on screen: the same question as a party game, judged against a crowd far bigger than one table.

While families played, psychologists were timing the same task for a different reason. Naming against a clock turned out to be one of the quickest windows into how memory is organised and how well it is working.

• 1938: L. L. Thurstone's study of Primary Mental Abilities counted word fluency among them, measured by timed tests that asked for as many words as possible under a rule.
• 1944: W. A. Bousfield and C. H. W. Sedgewick timed people naming members of categories and found the same curve every time: answers pour out at first, then slow to a trickle as the easy ones run out.
• 1967: Borkowski, Benton and Spreen asked people to say as many words as they could beginning with a letter in a fixed time. The letters F, A and S became a standard test, still in use.
• 1973: Bernard Isaacs and A. T. Kennie's set test asked older patients to name up to ten each of colours, animals, fruits and towns. Naming animals for a minute became one of the most common quick checks of memory and language.
• 1997: Angela Troyer and colleagues split the task into clustering, a run of answers from one corner of a category, and switching, the jump to the next corner.
• 2012: Thomas Hills, Michael Jones and Peter Todd showed that people move between those corners the way animals move between feeding patches, leaving each when it stops paying.

Today psychologists call these verbal fluency tests, in two kinds: by meaning (animals, fruits) and by sound (words starting with F). The party game is both at once.

Put the history side by side and two traditions appear. One rewards the common answer: Family Feud pays you for saying what most people said. The other rewards the rare one: Stadt, Land, Fluss halves an answer someone shares, Scattergories crosses it out, and Pointless pays most for the answer nobody gave.

The rarity tradition had one weakness. A party game can only compare your answer with the people in the room, and a television show can only survey a hundred people once per question. Neither can say how rare an answer really is.

Krillocity keeps the oldest parts of the game, a category and a clock, and changes how rarity is judged. Every prompt has a bank of the answers people give to it, ranked by how often each comes up, so an answer's worth is set by a crowd far larger than any table. An answer the bank does not know goes to an AI judge, which checks that it fits and decides how rare it is.

Instead of crossing out shared answers, Krillocity grades every answer on six tiers, from 100 m of swimming for the one everybody gives to 1,000 m for the one almost nobody does. Your common answers still count, just for less, which keeps the opening burst of Bousfield and Sedgewick's curve worth typing. And instead of reading answers aloud at the end, the race happens live: up to sixteen racers on one underwater course, every krill moving as its answers land.

The repetition rule survives intact. Type the same answer twice and the second comes back marked said. And the lab's lessons carry straight over: the race tactics guide turns clustering and switching into a plan for 30 seconds.

Next time a few people are together, play a round on paper: rule four columns, call a letter, and score 10 for an answer, 5 for one someone shares, 20 for a column only you filled. Then set up a private race on the same night and feel the difference a crowd of thousands makes to what counts as rare.