Foreheads is a helper for one of the oldest party games there is.
A parlour game
The game grew out of Twenty Questions, which was being played in London drawing rooms by the 1780s. One player thinks of something, and the others have twenty yes-or-no questions to find it.
The classic opener was “Animal, vegetable or mineral?”, after the three kingdoms of the natural world. That made for good arguments: a wooden table is vegetable, and a leather shoe is animal.
Across the Atlantic
In 1823, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, George Canning, played it at a London dinner with the American minister, Richard Rush. Rush wrote the game up in his memoirs, which helped carry it to America.
On the air
Twenty Questions became a radio panel show in New York in 1946. The BBC ran its own version on the radio from 1947 to 1976.
Television gave us another classic question, “Is it bigger than a breadbox?”, which Steve Allen made famous on What’s My Line? in 1953.
Onto your forehead
Putting the answer on a card on your forehead is a newer twist.
In Australia it was Celebrity Head, a favourite segment of Hey Hey It’s Saturday: three contestants had a famous name placed above their heads and asked yes-or-no questions to work out who they were.
Heads Up!, the 2013 phone app, puts a screen there instead, with shouted clues.
Elsewhere it’s Who Am I?, the forehead game, the sticky note game or the Name Game.
Around the world
In Hungary it’s barkochba, played in Budapest cafés by 1911. It’s named after Simon bar Kokhba, who, legend says, questioned a captured spy who could only nod or shake his head.
In Germany it’s Wer bin ich? (“Who am I?”). A tense tavern scene in Inglourious Basterds (2009) turns on a round of it.
Botticelli
A trickier version for trivia fans. One player picks a famous person and says only the first letter of their surname, say “B”.
The others ask about anyone with that letter: “Have you been in a Bond film?”, thinking of Pierce Brosnan. The answerer dodges by naming someone else who fits (“No, I’m not Halle Berry”). If they can’t think of anyone, the asker wins a straight yes-or-no question about the real answer.
It’s named for its rule of thumb: the person has to be at least as famous as the painter Sandro Botticelli.
Twenty questions, a million answers
If every question halves what’s left, twenty questions can pick one thing out of more than a million. Counting information in yes-or-no answers, or bits, is the idea at the heart of computing.
The physicist John Wheeler liked a trick version. The guesser leaves the room, and everyone else secretly agrees not to pick anything. They answer each question however they like, as long as it fits every answer so far. By the end there is an answer, though nobody ever chose one.