How to Host a Rarest Answer Game Night (Pointless at Home)

A rarest answer game asks everyone to name something in a category, then rewards the correct answers nobody else gave. The BBC quiz Pointless has built a whole show on it since 2009: a hundred members of the public get 100 seconds to name things, and the best answer is a right one none of them said. You can run the same idea at home in two ways: with paper and a survey you take beforehand, or online in a private room in Krillion, where the game does the counting for you.

The paper route takes about 30 minutes of preparation and suits 4 to 12 people round a table. The online route takes two minutes to set up and suits anything from 2 to 75 players, in one living room or spread across a video call. Both are below, with checklists you can copy.

• 8 to 10 prompts, each with plenty of valid answers (a list follows)
• A survey of 10 to 20 people who are not coming, collected a few days before
• One answer sheet per team, pens, and a scoring sheet for the host
• A phone timer set to 30 seconds
• One reference phone, held by the host only, for settling disputes
• Something for a jackpot jar: coins, sweets or raffle tickets

Run Your Own Survey Beforehand

The survey is what turns a list quiz into a rarest answer quiz. Send your prompts to 10 to 20 people outside the party: a family group chat, a few coworkers, your neighbours. Ask for the first answer that comes to mind, one per prompt, and tell them not to look anything up. If you can ask them live, give each prompt about 20 seconds. You want the crowd's reflexes, not its best effort.

Then tally. For each prompt, list every answer and how many people gave it. With 20 respondents, multiply each count by 5 so the scores run out of 100, the way the show's do. An answer seven people gave scores 35. A correct answer nobody gave scores 0, and that is the one everyone is hunting for.

Expect the same few names to swamp your tally. Our analysis of Krillion's prompt banks found that the crowd's reflex answers repeat across categories: Titanic is the commonest answer on 22 different prompts, Apple on 19, Shrek on 18 and Paris on 17. If your survey asks for a film, a ship or a disaster, someone will have written Titanic.

1. The host reads the prompt aloud. Each team has 30 seconds to agree on one answer and write it down.
2. Answers are read out one team at a time, and the host checks each against the survey.
3. A correct answer scores what the survey gave it, from 5 to 100.
4. A correct answer nobody in the survey gave scores 0. That is a pointless answer, and the team puts one token in the jackpot jar.
5. A wrong answer scores 100, the same as the most obvious answer possible.
6. The lowest total after all the prompts wins, and the winner takes the jar.

For the scoring sheet, draw a grid with one row per prompt and one column per team, plus a final column for the survey's top three answers. Fill a cell as "Kiwi, 10" or "Durian, 0" so the sheet doubles as a record of the night. When you reveal, read the survey from the commonest answer down and save the zeros for last: the silence before a pointless answer is the best moment of the game.

Pick prompts with wide fields. A prompt with only a few dozen right answers becomes a test of who knows the one obscure item, and the round dies. In Krillion's banks a prompt accepts 137 distinct answers on average, but the range is huge: "Name an Italian cheese" accepts 610, while "Name a province of China" accepts only 22. Aim for the wide end. These work well at a table:

• Name a city in Germany
• Name a dish made with lentils
• Name a gym exercise
• Name a video game
• Name a musical instrument
• Name a job that comes with a uniform
• Name something you would find in a kitchen drawer
• Name a famous bridge
• Name a breed of dog
• Name a sport played with a ball

Avoid prompts with a hard ceiling. Countries are the tightest category in our banks by a long way, since there are only about 195 of them, and "Name a planet" has eight answers. Avoid anything a reasonable person could argue about, too: "Name a healthy food" will start a fight before it finishes a round.

Settle these before the first prompt, not in the middle of a row about cheese.

• Who rules: the host, using one agreed reference (a Wikipedia list on the host's phone works). The host's call is final.
• Spelling: if it is clear what was meant, it counts.
• Same answer: two answers that would be one entry in a list are the same answer. "Mature cheddar" matches "Cheddar".
• Too vague: "Bird" for "Name a bird" is refused. Allow one swap per team per night, with 10 seconds to write it.
• Kids' teams: a child may write two answers and keep the lower score.
• Tie-break: one sudden death prompt, lowest score wins. Still tied? Ask "How many of our survey said Titanic?" and the nearest guess takes it.

If nobody wants to run a survey, the Krillion game has one built in. Every prompt comes with an answer bank that ranks each accepted answer by how often people give it, from Plankton, the one everyone says, at 4 points, up through Too Clever, Schooler, Rare and Deep Cut to One in a Krillion at 100. Note that the scoring runs the other way from the show: here rare answers earn more, so the highest total wins. It is free, runs in a browser, and nobody needs to sign up.

1. Open playdaily.org/krillion on a phone or laptop and press Play multiplayer on the start screen.
2. Type a name, then choose Create a room.
3. Pick the prompts per dive (5, 7, 10, 15, 25 or 50), the time to answer (anywhere from 5 to 60 seconds) and private.
4. A private room stays off the public list and gets a six-digit code. Read the code out, or press Invite to copy a link for the group chat. Guests open the lobby and type the code into the code box.
5. Up to 75 players fit in one room. There is no host: everyone gets the same prompt at the same moment on a shared clock.

A wrong answer is simply refused, so a player can type again while the clock runs. An accepted answer ends that prompt for them. There is no speed bonus, which keeps the fast typists from running away with it.

• Kids, roughly 8 to 12: 5 prompts, 45 to 60 seconds. Put younger ones in pairs on one device, one thinking and one typing.
• Family across generations: 7 prompts, 30 seconds, so grandparents are not racing the keyboard.
• Pub or friends' night: 10 prompts, 20 seconds. Quick, loud, and over before anyone's drink is empty.
• Office icebreaker or video call: 7 prompts, 25 seconds, the same shape as a solo classic dive.
• Large groups of 30 to 75: 10 or 15 prompts, 30 seconds, to give slow typists a chance. The reveal gets funnier the more people are in it.
• Experts: 5 to 10 seconds a prompt, if you want to find out who really knows their cheeses.
• Marathon: 25 or 50 prompts, for the people who will not go home anyway.

After each prompt's clock runs out, the reveal shows every answer in the room and its tier. This is the bit to share. Put one device on the television, or have everyone in the same room turn their phones round, and give the reveal a few seconds of attention before the next count-in.

A few house rules that make it land: the host reads out the Plankton pile first, so the room can groan at itself. Whoever found the rarest answer has to explain it. A One in a Krillion earns the right to pick the next music track. Each dive ends on a podium, which is the natural point to refill drinks and start another. Remote players can join the banter in the room's chat.

If you love the ritual of a survey and a scoring sheet, go paper. If you want zero preparation, or half your guests are on a screen anyway, go online. Plenty of hosts do both: a few paper rounds while the food is out, then a final online dive for the trophy. Open Krillion Unlimited, make a private room and send the code. For a closing round that turns the whole idea upside down, try Noillirk, where the most common answer scores best.