Professor Liar
General
Professor Liar is a traditional parlor game in that it mostly just requires your brains. It can also be done as an improv game without the point system, but what’s the point of a game if you’re not crushing some opponent? The goal is to successfully pretend to be an expert on a topic presenting before a panel of experts.
Setup
Set up two decks – the noun deck and the expertise deck. The noun deck contains nouns. The expertise deck contains general areas of study or names of fake books, with blanks left for nouns.
Gameplay
Each round, a team selects a “Professor” from its group. The professor then pulls a card from each deck to determine what he is a professor of. An example might be “fruit metaphysics.” The professor then stands before all players of opposing teams. The latter group is called “The Examiners.”
The Professor must answer any question put forth by the examiners for 90 seconds.
The Professor loses if at any point she
1) Hesitates more than 1 second
2) Contradicts herself
3) Misspeaks or Stumbles verbally
4) Fails to answer the question
5) Laughs (although condescending false professorial laughter is permitted)
6) Says “um”
If the professor does not lose, her team gets 1 point.
The first team to 5 points wins.
Caveats
The Professor may be interrupted at any time, at which point she must address the new question.
The questions must at least tenuously pertain to the subject matter.
Examiners should not attempt to be funny. The goal is to prove that the Professor does not actually know anything about the topic.
What denotes failure is, of course, open to group discretion and should be established by the group. For example, the definition of “misspeak” is very broad. If, say, the Professor accidentally says “Yemen” and not “lemon” during a lecture on “fruit psychology,” she should not instantly lose. She can claim that Yemen is important to our understanding of fruit psychology and attempt to justify.
Variation Ideas
Chomsky Mode – if the professor breaks monotone, she loses.
NOTES FOR PLAYTESTERS
-Would it be more fun if the prof had to give a 30 second “presentation” then receive questions?
Supplies
2 Decks:
1) Nouns and Adjectives
2) Fields of Expertise
Deck 1:
1) Acne
2) Air
3) Airplane
4) Alien
5) American
6) Atom
7) Attractiveness
8) Australia
9) Baby
10) Baldness
11) Bank
12) Bat
13) Bear
14) Beauty
15) Bird
16) Blubber
17) Boat
18) Bone
19) Britain
20) Burglar
21) Buttocks
22) Cake
23) Calculator
24) Cat
25) Caveman
26) China
27) Clown
28) Coffee
29) Comedy
30) Computer
31) Corgi
32) Corn
33) Cow
34) Cowboy
35) Death
36) Dictator
37) Dolphin
38) Drama
39) Dress
40) Ear
41) Earth
42) Electricity
43) Email
44) Enemy
45) Father
46) Female
47) Fire
48) France
49) Fruit
50) Gas
51) Gun
52) Hairball
53) Hamburger
54) House
55) Human
56) Insect
57) Japan
58) Jedi
59) Laser
60) Lincoln
61) Liquid
62) Male
63) Mars
64) Missile
65) Money
66) Moon
67) Mother
68) Mouth
69) Mustache
70) Napoleon
71) Navy
72) Ninja
73) Octopus
74) Ottoman
75) Pants
76) Pie
77) Plasma
78) Police
79) President
80) Priest
81) Rattlesnake
82) Robot
83) Samurai
84) Sandwich
85) Scientist
86) Solid
87) Sponge
88) Star
89) Submarine
90) Sun
91) Surgeon
92) Sword
93) T. Rex
94) Teenager
95) Time Traveler
96) Tofu
97) Venus
98) Viking
99) Walrus
100) Zombie
Deck 2
1) Amphibious ____(s)
2) Antarctic ____(s)
3) Applied ____ology
4) Are ____(s) Actually Just Adult ____(s)
5) Behavioral ____ology
6) Can ____(s) Use Tools?
7) Computation via ____(s)
8) Conservation of ____(s)
9) Creating More Aerodynamic ____(s)
10) Criminal ____(s)
11) Do____(s) Exist?
12) Do ____(s) Feel Pain?
13) Evolutionary History of ____(s)
14) Fair Distribution of ____(s)
15) Famous ____(s) and Their ____(s)
16) Feminist ____ Theory
17) How the Internet is Fixing ____(s)
18) In the Company of ____(s)
19) Islamic ____(s)
20) Juvenile ____(s)
21) Lunar ____(s)
22) Marketing to ____(s)
23) Marxist ____ Theory
24) Mechanical ____(s)
25) Medical ____(s)
26) Micro____ology
27) Military Use of ____(s)
28) Molecular ____ology
29) Musical ____ (s)
30) My Time On ____ Island
31) Myth and Fable Among ____(s)
32) Optimization of ____(s)
33) Outmoded ____ Paradigms
34) Philosophy of ____(s)
35) Prehistoric ____(s)
36) Proof of the Existence of ____
37) Quantum ____(s)
38) Robotic ____(s)
39) Schizophrenia in ____s
40) Space-____ (s)
41) Statistical ____istics
42) Superconductive ____(s)
43) Synthetic ____(s)
44) The Habits of Highly Effective ____(s)
45) The Law of Large ____(s)
46) The Law of ____(s)
47) The Periodic Table of ____(s)
48) The Phases of ____
49) The Source of ____(s)
50) The Subtle Difference Between ____(s) and
51) The ____ Cycle
52) The ____ Hypothesis
53) The ____ Problem
54) The ____centric view of Cosmology
55) Theoretical ____ Science
56) Urban ____(s)
57) Use of Language by ____(s)
58) Wave-____ duality
59) When ____(s) Roamed the Earth
60) ____(s)
61) ____(s), Nature’s ____(s)
62) ____(s) in Captivity
63) ____(s) in Christianity
64) ____(s) in the Media
65) ____-____ hybridization
66) ____ Aging
67) ____ Algorithms
68) ____ Cognition
69) ____ Conservation
70) ____ Demographics
71) ____ Economics
72) ____ Ethics
73) ____ Evolutionary Psychology
74) ____ Funeral Rites
75) ____ Genetics
76) ____ Homeopathy
77) ____ Informatics
78) ____ Legal Codes
79) ____ Linguistics
80) ____ Mathematics
81) ____ Mating Rituals
82) ____ Metaphysics
83) ____ Midwifery
84) ____ Nutrition
85) ____ Oppression
86) ____ Paleontology
87) ____ Parasitology
88) ____ Poetry
89) ____ Politics
90) ____ Power Generation Systems
91) ____ Reproduction
92) ____ Seismology
93) ____ Survival Strategy
94) ____ Tectonics
95) ____ Theory
96) ____ ecology
97) ____ engineering
98) ____ology
99) ____ physiology
100) ____tronics
that sounds amusing. ill give it a go this weekend
“The Professor must answer any question put forth by the examiners for seconds.” How many seconds? Or do you get seconds for answering questions?
I wish I had friends that would play games like this with me without finding it silly or embarassing.
This sounds a lot like law school moot court. :)
It might be more fun, though, with the following changes:
1. The questioners tried to come up with the most ridiculous questions they could reasonably justify within the game’s framework and still phrase in an appropriately academic-sounding way;
2. The Professor loses if (s)he can’t keep a straight face; and
3. The questioners lose—or, rather, the Professor wins—if the Professor can make any questioner laugh out loud while still maintaining the aforementioned straight face.
I like the idea of having to keep a straight face.
Have you played this ever? I think it could probably use a little refinement in the rules. I suppose that several dominating strategies would quickly develop if people actually played it competitively. Very quickly I think the boring lecture on fundamentals would be a sound professorial strategy.
“To understand the nature of fruit metaphysics we must first understand the history of man’s interaction with fruit…” queue diatribe on the history of mankind.
Or alternatively go to astrophysics/cosmology/philosophy/quantum mechanics. Any interrupting question just divert back to main lecture.
I was gonna have a rule against going off on a tangent, BUT I think the interruption should address it. Maybe there needs to be a rule that the professor may only answer questions.
This sounds a little bit like “Just a Minute”, which has been airing as a BBC Radio panel game for umpteen years. “Just a Minute” is an individual game, not a team game. On radio, it’s played with four players and a moderator. The moderator sets the topics, and the players take turns being the first to speak on the topic. The goal is to speak for 60 seconds (just a minute) on the given subject, without hesitation, repetition, or deviation. Points are gained for correctly challenging another player, for being incorrectly challenged, and for speaking at the end of the 60 seconds. This can currently be heard online on BBC Radio 4 Extra, on Thursday mornings at 9:30 British time (and for seven days afterwards, via BBC’s “listen again”).
Oh, didn’t knew about this show (45 years that it’s running !), and hopefully the BBC doesn’t seem to region-block it for non-UK IP addresses – thanks a lot Morris Keesan ! ;)
This sounds like an incredibly amusing game. I think bonus points should be awarded for sounding as pretentious as possible.
Hey zach!
So I wrote up a quick script in python to manage the game (keep track of scores, time 90 seconds and generate topics).
Here is the code:
http://pastebin.com/HwMFuaVX
(runs in python 3.1.2)
I really really want to do the same thing to trial of the clone. Do you have a plain text copy? A list of all the items and attributes?
cheers
-IIAOPSW
Awesome! Any chance you can turn this into javascript?
For TotC, we’re doing something like that in house.
I would recommend the 30 second opening lecture and questioner lose conditions for “versus” play. The first one solves both the “Fundamentals” gambit as well as eliminating the need for the first question always being “So what is ______?” Questioner lose conditions make the questioners feel more like they’re playing a game too and less like instruments of the game’s mechanics. Some people are into that, but not everyone.
Suggestions for people who take the game even more seriously:
- Allow a 30 second “Deliberation” after the opening lecture for the Questioners to come up with a game plan.
- Since it is a team game, allow the Professor to divert one question to their “TA” with the requirement that they must always introduce the TA by an alternate (perhaps silly) name and state their area of specialized expertise. The teammate now stands in and is subject to all the previous rules. If an interrupt question is asked, the original professor must take over.
“That’s an interesting question that I’ve had my research assistant working on. Marsala Kingdom Jones is working on her masters in the gender duality of horned helmets. (original subject: “Feminist Viking Theory)”
It is absolutely a brilliant improv game which I shall totally be adding to my go-to list of improv games.
I am so in.
Sounds awesome.
I may make the following modification based on # of players:
No teams.
I believe this game would be far cooler if it was called Professor Bullshit.
Love this concept but it seems too much like a “try not to laugh” game… it would be interesting if instead of teams it was all individuals and, in addition to not being able to laugh or hesitate the rest of the people present would rate you or vote for favorite or something like that… I mean I can talk a load of bollocks about anything, the question is, did I talk a *great* load of bollocks or was I just rambling…
Actually… another variation of this would be to try to get the examiners to laugh. Just see how long it can go before one team cracks.
Are you familiar with the UK panel radio show “Just a Minute”? Here’s the first part of a show. Contestants are given a topic and must speak fluently about it for a minute without deviation, hesitation, or repeating a word (!).
This sounds like a fun game. I took the script supplied by IIAOPSW and have put it on the web as a Google AppEngine application. You can see it at
http://professor-liar.appspot.com.
The code is checked into GitHub for anyone who cares. The repository is here:
https://github.com/bartelby/professor-liar.
Enjoy!
Made a drinking game out of it with a few friends. Mega fun. I always win because I rock at public speaking.
Awesome! Any notes?
I think it would also be fun to have debate on the chosen topic where both players act as eminent scholars in the field.
Just read about this game <2 hours ago and played with friends at college. We did it rules-lite, without teams (Just rotating professors with the other five serving as examiners), a scoring mechanism, or actual timing.
It still turned to be extremely fun, especially when the Mock Trial kid talked about the Periodic Table of Mouths for five minutes in Chomsky mode.
Also, best quote about this game from my Foreign Policy prof:
“Pfff. I’ve been doing this for two-plus-hour stretches for years and nobody’s caught on.”
“…Whoops.”