Contact

Contact is a word game that guarantees that no conversation topics are at hand at game end, either because you exhausted them before commencing, or because you killed them by playing. As far as we know, Contact originated at Mathcamp, and spread through the various nerd camps until it got to Floor π.

How To Play

One person, the Dealer, has a word; the others are trying to determine its identity by asking questions about it. To start, the first letter of the word is provided to everyone. Whenever a guesser poses a question that the Dealer is unable to answer satisfactorily, other guessers may establish "Contact", indicating that they think they have the same answer to the question as the asker does. When the Dealer gives up, they count down from 3, then say their words. If they match, the Dealer provides the next letter of the word. Play continues in this fashion until the Dealer is forced to use his/her word as an answer to a question, or until the guessers run out of vocabulary.

House Rules

• Questions may be re-asked in their original form once.
• Questions may not require answers that cannot be reasonably expected to be in the Dealer's knowledge bank.
• The person asking the "winning" question becomes the Dealer for the next round.
• While having phrases or foreign words or proper nouns as a word is not permissible for the Dealer's word, answers to questions may be the this type, provided that they do not violate any of the other rules.
• Questions may be non-questions.
• The countdown may begin immediately upon a Contact.