How to play @cluedo
@cluedo is a twitter based guessing game. The idea is simple: test your powers of deduction and your knowledge of twitter-folks by working out who is running the @cluedo account. To play you simply need to be on twitter and follow http://twitter.com/cluedo
Notes for Guessers
I'm a game. Read the advice. Follow me, @reply me some questions, guess who I am. Possibly win a prize perhaps.
- My tweets will be honest answers to questions.
- I will post at least once an hour while I'm online.
- If there are no questions, I will tweet a clue
- Once you have asked me THREE questions you are allowed to guess my identity.
- When I'm identified, I'll close the game, and favourite the winning tweet, then pass the account off to a new player of my choice.
Notes for @cluedos
So someone has put you in the hotseat? Here's what you need to do:
- Confirm you want to play and wait for the username and password to be sent to you
- Login, and start playing!
- Favourite the winning tweet and confirm the end of the game
- Select someone from your network and invite them to be @cluedo. We suggest you ask them to reply to you in a certain timescale
- always be truthful, but feel free to be evasive
- follow anyone that follows @cluedo during your play
- you can request retweets or for new followers to "hello @cluedo" but shouldn't illicit followers in any other way (it's more fun and tells us more about Twitter if we allow the @cluedo network to grow organically from the twitter stream and through hearsay)
- have fun
11 comments
What strategies did you use to keep your identity a secret?
So, yes, being @cluedo.
To be honest, being picked as @cluedo worried me.
What if I cock it up? What if I don't keep track of everything? What if I get all confused and tweet as myself? What if no one joins in? (Born worrier) But @genzaichi who nominated me was very reassuring and helpful (Thank you!) and once it started it was fun.
Strategy-wise, I kind of stuck to a persona - a bit aloof, I nicked Nikki's "One is a female" style as this was a good way not to tweet like myself - and to sound a bit posh! My @cluedo was also very strict with the rules; this helped me keep organised during the game. (Although not loads of people were playing, it was still a bit of work to keep up.)
I kind of put my own spin on the email I sent the next @cluedo (I'll forward it to you - without revealing who they are, of course!) There may be some more stuff in there about how the game went etc. I'll send Nikki's email to you too while I'm at it.
Oh, a slightly confusing thing was that I didn't know when to play the game. Should it be constant or will that just hack people off?
As for guessing who @cluedo was (twice!) ...
Keeping an eye on other people's questions and the answers really helped - and I definitely lucked out on a couple of the questions I asked too (Likemind and birthplace, Jon!). I also happen to have a good memory, so remembered reading on CiB or Nikki's blog or somewhere that she'd had an exhibition in Germany. So when she said she'd worked there, it kind of sealed it.
Oh yes, those things and the fact I'm an evil genius ;)
I'm interested to see how the game works when it spreads out of the sphere of 'people who kind of know each other or at least know of each other'. Wonder what'll happen …
It's a bit like this @cluedo register that has evolved through Nikki and then your tenure as @cluedo ("One is a she" etc.). That's a natural development that has come from gameplay.
It's also interesting to see things like @dubber adjusting his twitter use to accommodate the game: all the stuff you can't predict is what makes the metagame fun :)
I think my experience was similar to Katie's pretty much.
One also went down the posh route, what. I was planning to tweet with a 'silly voice' like a crazy senorita or some such, but decided I'd never been very good at accents and played safe.
I used cluedo twitter search and @replies to keep a track of questions and answers (don't forget that the tweets of tweeters with protected updates don't show up in the twitter search - you wouldn't want to miss those!) & I used pencil and paper to keep a track of question counts. I numbered the answers so people could keep count of their own questions.
I had tweetdeck open for personal tweeting and almost messed up totally by helpfully mistweeting a link to the cluedo twitter search via @karmadillo! That was quickly deleted and luckily people's tweetdeck/twhirls hadn't already picked it up before it disappeared so I got away with it. After that I decided to pretty much just concentrate on @cluedo!
I found getting the game going really difficult. I started the game as I noticed a few cluedo followers tweeting but they must have been preoccupied (and the other half were in the pub!) so although the game took around 4 hours, not many questions were actually asked before @graphiquillan stepped up with her winning (lucky!) guess.
All in all it was much fun to 'host' the game and I'm looking forward to playing it again too!
It will be interesting to see how the games go as follower grow and the game draws on wider networks of players. I also wondered how a "celebrity" cluedo could work, so people in still wider networks could play along?
Great idea you two :)
My thoughts have already been put in an email and sent to the next @cluedo. I'd be *really* interested to see that document in a few weeks' time, but I don't think that's something for public viewing just yet...
What I'd like to see here is some feedback from the winner(s): what first put you on the trail and what strategies did you use to try and identify the mystery person?