One evil professor who wants to fail every student.
A class full of students who aren’t above blatant cheating to pass anyway.
This is… Pop Quiz!

  • Duration: 10-15 min

  • Participants: 6-10

  • Language: Rules in English, but the gameplay is language independent

  • Digital platform: ZOOM (video meeting). The game group will meet first on the Discord server.

Preview

Pop Quiz is a school-themed social deduction / party game. Most players are Students, and one player is the Teacher. During play, the Teacher asks one true-or-false question at a time to a student of their choice. Each student knows some answers, but usually not the ones they are asked. However, someone in the class knows the answer… and during game setup, the students develop a set of hand signals for “true” or “false” that they can send to each other. The student being asked can scan the other players to find their classmate who is signaling them, in order to give the correct answer. Meanwhile, everyone else in the class is also making a meaningless hand signal in order to confuse or distract the Teacher from spotting the true signals.

If the teacher thinks they know who is giving the true hand signal, they can accuse a player of cheating. If the accused does know the answer to the current question, the student team gets additional questions counted as wrong; however, a false accusation can turn some wrong answers back into right ones at the end of the game.

The Teacher is not completely alone. There is also a Teacher’s Pet who sits with the students but is secretly on the teacher’s side. They may “accidentally” give a misleading signal, answer a question incorrectly, or tip the teacher off to the actual cheating. The students can win by answering enough questions correctly or by correctly identifying the Teacher’s Pet at the end of the game; otherwise, the Teacher and Teacher’s Pet both win.

This game was designed for language accessibility: in spite of communication being central to the play, Pop Quiz! can be played by deaf and hard-of-hearing players, and even a group of players that do not share a common language (as long as the players all know the rules).

About the designer

Ian Schreiber has been making games professionally since the year 2000, first as a gameplay programmer and then as a game designer. He has worked on several published video games, co-authored two books on game design, and co-founded Global Game Jam, the largest in-person game creation event in the world. He currently teaches game design at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York.