A particular kind of
brain teaser, in which the participants are given a very
minimal description of the situation, and determine the full story by asking
yes or no questions. They differ from the examples in the
lateral thinking node in that the answers can't be immediately derived from the questions. The game requires at least two people -- one person who knows the solution and can answer questions ("yes," "no," or "
irrelevant"), and at least one person to ask them. If you try to solve them through sheer
brainpower, you'll feel badly
betrayed when you peek at the solutions -- at first glance they look totally
impossible. With assiduous questioning and
creativity, though, they're entirely
tractable.
Below are some good examples of the lateral thinking puzzle genre. Most of the questions could be phrased differently, with more or less information depending on how hard you want to make people sweat. Solutions are in another node, more for space issues than for spoilers.
This is a really good party game, incidentally, for smart people who like questioning, pondering, and observing a problem from all sides (which should apply to most people here). In fact, the problems marked with an asterisk were made up by friends for use at our last social gathering.
- A man walks into a restaurant and orders albatross soup. He takes one taste, runs outside, and kills himself.
- A man hears something on the radio that makes him kill himself.
- A man lies dead in his room. Under the bed are several small discs of wood.
- A man receives a package, opens it, looks at its contents, and sends it to another man. The second man opens it, looks at its contents, and buries it.
- A man (they're always men, for some reason) is dead in a phone booth.
- A bell tolls. A man dies. A bell tolls.
- A man wakes up at night and turns off the light. In the morning he looks out the window and kills himself.
- A man lies dead on the sidewalk.*
- A healthy man checks into the hospital. Soon afterwards he is dead.*
Solutions
here...