Cooperative Bulls and Cows

Objective: The goal is for every player to determine their word while minimizing the total number of turns taken.

Gameplay:

• It is a turn based game, the youngest player starts, and turns proceed clockwise.
• Each person has a unique 4 letter word. You know everyone’s word except your own.
  • To distribute words, the player to your left can write your word on a phone/sticky note, and then hand it to you.
  • If you’d like, you can have the 4 letter word have no duplicated letters, but that’s not required.
• The team wins if everyone successfully guesses their own word.
• On a given turn, you can:
  • alter the previously stated word by changing the letter at one spot in the word and anagramming, i.e. unscrambling, the resulting word. Note you don’t need to anagram the resulting word, but you do need to change exactly one letter.
    • For instance, if the last word was rate, you could say rave or tray, but not tear (since the letters are all the same) or rile (since more than one letter is changed).
  • reveal the bulls and cows in the current word for a given player.
    • For instance, if beak was changed to bike and Shreya’s word is belt, you could tell her bike has 1 cow and 1 bull.
• Players can keep playing until all players guessed their word correctly.
  • A player can guess their word at any time, out of turn and independent of the sequence. An incorrect guess is failure, though.
  • Once a player guesses their word, they can keep playing to give the remaining players information.
• This game transfers nicely to the two player version, where each player just thinks of the other player’s word.