On my first day as a house painter, I was introduced to the word game “Botticelli”. I became a big fan of the game and now teach it to every one who paints for me.

I did not know or remember that Botticelli was 15th century Italian painter. At least as far as the game was concerned, it did not matter.

As it turned out, 20 years later my family visited Florence, Italy in the middle of a Botticelli festival.

Botticelli, like baseball fits house painting very well. Your hands are busy, but your mind is free – mostly.

If you wish to read the full rules (in 2 variations), wikipedia has them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botticelli_%28game%29

In summary, in Botticelli the “it” person chooses a famous person that she thinks everyone will know and announces the first letter of the last name. For example, for Yoko Ono he would declare, “ I have an “O””.

To solve the mystery “O” the other players may ask yes/no questions of the “it” player, BUT the right must be earned with a successful trick question.

For example, continuing with Ms.Ono, I might ask :

“Were you George W. Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury?”

If the “it” person answers correctly (“No. I am not Paul O’Neill.”), then I am denied a yes/no question. It is perfectly legal and advisable to get down in the weeds with your trick questions. For example, instead
of the fairly easy fact of his being Bush’s first Sec. of Treasury I could have asked: “Did you once travel through Africa with Bono of U2?” or “Are you a former president of Alcoa?” As long as the facts given are true and the syntax not too mangled, the question will fly.

So if I asked the trickier question and “it” was unable to answer, the ordeal truly begins as we jointly begin to build our dossier on the mystery person.

We begin with the basics: “Are you real?”



This separates the world of Othello, Olive Oyl, and Odin from our world. Then you move on to living/dead. If dead, “Were you alive in this century? Last century?” etc. Then you move on to the big categories for fame – politics, acting, music. For the it person, selecting someone off the beaten track, or someone hidden in pain sight, is the goal. For example, the longest and most pursued mystery person I can recall was Tammy Fay Baker. At the time she was in the news a lot, but she didn’t come to mind in the context of Botticelli because she doesn’t fit any category that we hit on.

Oddly, I’ve never done anything much with sports in Botticelli even though as a fantasy sports enthusiast I have literally hundreds of sports names on the tip of tongue. By common consent I have not used them because the folks I’ve played with aren’t sportsy. If the game drags then we’ll loosen things up – although I often apologize before asking something like do you DH for the red Sox (David Ortiz).

Likewise, if we had a serious Trekky in our midst, we’d soon tire of hearing Trekky questions. It’s just not polite.



There are some who prefer a more daring approach and will ask compound questions like: “are you a real, live, male, American in the arts?”

The answer would be “no” based on the gender – so the asker – and all the other players, as information is shared - is left with nothing.

It frequently happens that one player does the leg work while another, gets the final answer – in question form: “Are you Yoko Ono?” – “Yes! Indeed I am Yoko Ono!”



“The Birth of Venus” Botticelli’s best known, best loved work.

A brief bit about botticelli from Wikipedia:

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli or Il Botticello ("The Little Barrel"; March 1, 1445 – May 17, 1510)[1] was an Italian painter of the Florentine school during the Early Renaissance (Quattrocento). Less than a hundred years later, this movement, under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, was characterized by Giorgio Vasari as a "golden age", a thought, suitably enough, he expressed at the head of his Vita of Botticelli. His posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting, and The Birth of Venus and Primavera rank now among the most familiar masterpieces of Florentine art.

Other games

The Rock River Renovation’s radio game.
We used to play a vicious guess that tune variant. In our radio game the winner was the first player to 10 points.

To play you switch on the radio to WRSI or WKVT FM – our two preferred stations and off you go: first to identify the band/artist playing gets 2 points. HOWEVER, if the first guesser is wrong – she loses 2 points. If the first guesser is wrong and the second is right, he gets 1 point, if wrong loses 1 point.
Remember the payoff is for the playing artist, not the one who wrote the song. If All Along the Watchtower is playing and the guesser says, “Bob Dylan” but it’s the Jimi Hendrix version – it’s -2.
A player gets ONE guess on each song. If you tried and died, you step aside and abide (sorry. I won’t do that again).

Old standby: Grandma’s Trunk
This is the old road favorite for kids where you start with the line: “Grandma and I were going on a trip and in her trunk we put –“ and from each player adds an item alphabetically on her turn while remembering all the items that came before. The game varies depending on age and boredness level. I don’t recall ever getting to “Z”.

The numbers game
Talk about bored. This game worked best late in a sunny, hot day of applying oil paint when (in our theory) our personalities had been obliterated and we were all one – able to transmit thoughts from one to another with a little mental exertion (this never really worked).

An “it” person thinks up a number from 1 to 1,000 and says, “I have a number from 1 to 1,000”. The others try to guess the number. In the unlikely event that anyone gets the number, he gets 1,000 points.
The “it” person then repeats the procedure with 500, 100, 50, 10 and 5.

Winner? Who cares.

Would You Rather
Rather perverse little game. There are other variations out there, but ours is the one I was first introduced to.

In turn each player thinks up 3 unpleasant and probably lethal activities for the others to choose from. Each other player in turn picks one of the three activities and discusses in detail the “reasoning” behind the choice.

Good psychoanalyst’s game. Bit of a Rorschach test really.

What I had for dinner last night
This game is nothing more than an invitation to test your skills as a raconteur. Simply, you recount your life from the moment you left the crew last to the moment you returned.

Not literally, of course, but a raconteur picks and chooses and highlights and embellishes. Spontaneity is encouraged, but if you have good material, there’s nothing wrong with assembling and editing the story in your head as you’re driving to work or waiting till the Botticelli game ends to tell your story.

Oh, yes you can talk about what you ate, but you can also skip that part. We generally start the story by dropping a hint that there is a story to be told, then a helpful workmate will ask, “OK, cousin whaddya have for dinner last night?” And off you go.


The activity game
This is another guessing game but without trick questions. Works well with 2 or more.

“It” thinks up a very specific and potentially personal activity. For example, “watching Walter Cronkite talk about JFK’s assassination on the eve of his death with my parents”.

The guesser can ask any question he wants and as many as she wants to get to the answer.

Alphabet games
There’s any number of these that can be done. Their basic unfairness is part of the charm.

The main ones I remember are dog breeds and geographical features. Works with 2 players on up. In turn each player thinks of and names an “x” (where x = dog breed; a river anywhere in the world; etc. whatever you want) starting with the first letter “A”, next player first letter “B” and so on.