Morning name: Botticelli, the game

Huge backlog of morning names; this one is from 2/28.

Botticelli is a guessing game which requires the players to have a good knowledge of biographical details of famous people. The game has several variants, but the common theme is that one person or team thinks of a famous person, reveals their initial letter, and then answers yes/no questions to allow other players to guess the identity.

The game takes its name from the famous person having to be at least as famous as Sandro Botticelli, who is also the answer to the archetypal question, “Did you paint a picture of Venus rising?”, referring to his painting The Birth of Venus.

The painting has been parodied endlessly.

As for the game, back in the 60s I played it a lot, with friends, including colleagues at the MITRE Corp. We eventually had to institute a special rule enjoining one of our number from using the names of baseball players within a certain time range, because he had an essentially encyclopedic knowledge of the players from that period (the result of an intense childhood enthusiasm).

This entry was posted on March 17, 2016 at 5:33 am and is filed under Art, Morning names, Toys and games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Morning name: Botticelli, the game”

arnold zwicky Says:
March 17, 2016 at 7:30 am | Reply
From Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook:

Botticelli stays present in my memory thanks to an epic game that took place in my somewhat self-consciously intellectual college dorm lasting several days and involving a good fraction of the residents. The name to guess turned out be “Field Marshal Ney”.

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arnold zwicky Says:
March 19, 2016 at 2:08 pm | Reply
From Karen Schaffer on Facebook:

Karen Schaffer I remember Napoleon and Illya playing Botticelli in David McDaniel’s Man from Uncle books.

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