What Is The 20 Questions Game?
The 20 questions game is a simple yet super fun guessing game. In this game, one person thinks of something and then other players ask up to 20 yes/no questions to help them figure out what thing the other person is thinking of. The 20 questions game doesn’t require any materials or preparation, which makes it a great activity to play in class.
To play 20 questions, first, one person must think of a secret object and not tell anyone what it is. Then, that person should let the other players know what kind of thing it is. The secret object can be an animal, a famous person, a type of food, something you find in a classroom, or literally any other category you can think of.
Write your questions here.
Once the person has said what category the secret object belongs to, the other players can ask up to 20 questions to try and figure out what secret object the person is thinking of. These 20 questions must be ‘yes/no’ questions, also known as ‘closed questions’.
The players should use these questions to narrow down the possible answers so that they get a better chance of guessing the word correctly. For this reason, players should start out asking general questions and gradually move to more specific questions. For example, “Is it an animal?”, “Is it an animal that is kept as a pet?”, “Does it have whiskers?”, “Is it a cat?”, and so on.
Once the players who are guessing have a good idea of what the secret object is, they can go ahead and guess, even if they haven’t asked all 20 questions. To make this game a little more competitive, you can encourage students to try and guess the answer in as few questions as possible and award points accordingly. For example, one way to do this is to tell students they have 20 points to start with, and for each question they ask, they lose one point.