Herd Mentality

Correct is not one of the scoring categories

Herd Mentality rewards the answer that most people write. The factual answer can lose, while a guess you do not believe can earn a cow token if the room agrees.

So the question is not "What do I think?" It is "What will this room write?" You may know your friends very well right up until you have to bet a cow on their taste in sink snacks.

Read, write, reveal

One player is the Question Wrangler. They read the cards and hand out cow tokens, but they still answer every question and can win.

Everyone needs an answer sheet and pencil. The Wrangler might ask for the best food to eat over a sink. Everyone writes in private, then reveals one answer at a time.

Keep the answers covered until everyone has written. If people call them out, the first confident answer can pull the rest of the room toward it. Once the answers are fixed, argue as much as you like.

Every player who wrote the most popular answer receives one cow token. If six people wrote one answer and four wrote another, the six score. If the room splits evenly, nobody scores.

The Pink Cow is picky

The Pink Cow goes to the player with the sole unique answer. If three people each write a different one-off answer, none of them takes it. Missing the majority means no cow token that round. The Pink Cow only appears when yours is the sole unique answer.

You can keep collecting tokens while the Pink Cow sits in front of you, but you cannot win. It moves when another player becomes the sole odd one out in a later round.

That gets uncomfortable when a player reaches seven tokens and still has the cow. Their next majority answer will not be enough unless somebody else first finds a new way to be alone.

Eight cows, unless eight is a tie

The first eligible player to collect eight cow tokens wins. If several players reach eight in the same round, the target moves to nine. Keep raising it until one eligible player ends a round one token ahead.

There is no separate tiebreak game. You keep answering questions, which also means a close finish can run past the neat twenty-minute estimate.

At four players, matching one other person may be enough to form a majority. Across the site's collection for 8 to 12 players, hearing the answers is half the game. At twenty, put the Wrangler where everyone can hear and reveal in one direction around the room. Asking twenty people to shout at once is not a scoring system.

A large game without teams

Herd Mentality works with a crowd without dividing it into teams. Everyone writes during every round and keeps an individual score. Nobody is eliminated, and there is not much strategy to remember between questions.

The room does most of the work. The cards supply questions; the players supply the disagreements and accidental personality tests. If the same group sees the same questions again, the answers may become easier to predict, so the question pool matters over time.

Explain the Pink Cow before the first question

There is no trivia advantage and very little tactical overhead. Answers can be a few words, and an odd answer never removes anyone from play.

The Pink Cow puts unusual taste on display. Some groups will make a running joke out of the only person who chose the unfashionable sink snack. Another group may prefer to leave everyone's food opinions ungraded.

Before handing out answer sheets, explain that the sole odd answer takes the Pink Cow and its holder cannot win until it moves. If the room doesn't want unusual answers singled out, choose another game.