The Quiet Hour

Nine rooms, one hour, and one question in three parts: who is still in the house, which room is keeping them, and what they want. Everything the house tells you, it tells you alone — and saying it out loud costs two ticks of the hour and shuts the room that told you it. At the end the house asks its three questions and only counts the ones all of you answer the same way.

How it feels

• Unhurried dread
• Talking in the dark
• One lit window

What the design is for

• 01

  A house that remembers

  A room nobody has asked answers about the one thing it is about. Ask it a second time and it will also take the question you asked in the room you came from — so a worn path is an instrument, and the plan tells you where the marks are. Measured: it lets a table ask the question it actually wants 77 per cent of the time against 63 for a house that forgets.

• 02

  What you find is yours

  Every answer arrives on the asker’s own screen and nowhere else: not in the log, not in the record, not in anybody else’s view of the game. What the table can see is how many things you are sitting on and — because how much the house has left to say about each part is public — which of the three parts each of them is about. Everybody knows which part your sentence is about, and never which sentence.

• 03

  And saying it costs the hour

  A sentence on the wall is a sentence everybody has for the rest of the night. It costs two ticks rather than one, because the house is listening to you as well, and the room that told you it never answers anybody again. Nine rooms, thirteen answers’ worth of hour, and a table that says everything ends the night with half the house gone quiet.

• 04

  The house never lies

  Everything you are told is true of the night. There is no bluff here and nothing to distrust — the whole problem is that five people are each holding a third of a sentence, and the hour is only long enough for some of it.

• 05

  Three questions, answered together

  When the hour goes, the house asks who, which room, and what they want. Everybody answers at once and a question you do not all answer the same way is one the house does not count. Three out of three is the night.

• 06

  The difference is measured

  A table of four that says what it finds wins half its nights. The same four, on the same nights, keeping everything to themselves: fewer than one night in a hundred. And a table that never talks but has agreed a convention beforehand does no better — there is no way round the conversation.

• 07

  A table for one

  Not a practice mode. On your own an answer costs one tick instead of three, so the hour is fourteen questions rather than thirteen answers, and a measured solitary night comes out at the same one in two as a table of four.

• 08

  No elimination, and no computer opponent

  Nobody sits out, nobody is removed, and the last three questions are asked of all of you at once. There is no machine seat either: a computer cannot be talked round, and being talked round is the whole game.