Notes on Sheep, the game
My friend John Doench runs a game called Sheep. Season eight just started. You should play. It's super fun. About 300-400 people played last season.
Sheep is simple. You answer ten questions, and get 1 point for each other person who has the same answer as you. Essentially, you are trying to pick the most popular answer, not necessarily the best substantive answer. You have a week to get your answers in (week 1 is due Friday 1/16 at 5pm), results usually come out on Sunday, and the season is usually 10 weeks long, best cumulative score wins. You can consult the internet, but not other humans.
A few notes from having played many seasons now.
It's amazing how much a little (illegal) collusion would improve your sheet results. A group of my friends here in NoVA keep a local scoreboard, and if you took our majoritarian "consensus" answers for each question, that would usually beat the top score for the week from the entire game of 300+ people. That is, the wisdom of a crowd of 5 or 6 people is enough to dominate Sheep.
One reason for this is that it is very difficult in Sheep to recover from a single bummer answer. Especially on "easy" questions. If the question is what's the most romantic city in the world and you brainfart and put Barcelona instead of Paris, you are going to get zero points while everyone else gets like 250+. The name of the game isn't necessarily getting a top on every question. Much better to never get a bottom/zero.
The most dangerous questions are ones with substantively correct answers. Perhaps the most famous Sheep question of all-time is who is the greatest Red Sox player in history. Substantively, the answer is surely either Williams, Yaz, Clemens, or Pedro. But fucking Big Papi was the winning Sheep answer. Truly brutal.
People love to claim moral victories arguing they had the substantively correct answer, but there's no arguing with "you might be right on the substantive answer, but you're just wrong on the sheep answer." After all, that is the game. Sometimes, however, people will defend the winning sheep answer as the substantive best answer. Doench did that with Big Papi (he writes up short vignettes about each question with the results), and I still haven't forgiven him.
Comparing answers with your friends after you submit but before you get the results is hilariously good fun. Mostly because people constantly miss obvious answers and get stuck revealing they wrote Mary Lou Retton as the answer to Name a US gymnast when it's obvious Simone Biles is going to be worth 300 points. Just an awful feeling.
You really have to play the field. Sheep is based out of Harvard/MIT in Boston, and so sometimes you just have to decide if you are going to make a Boston play. Name a square. In an normal field, you might lean on Times or Trafalgar or even Tienamen. But in Sheep, you have to seriously consider Harvard. It's crushing when you forgot a likely Boston play---as I did in 2021 when I totally blanked that Marty Walsh was the former mayor of Boston, the question being name a cabinet secretary. But Boston plays can also backfire, so it's a trickly gambit.