Amazing Sphinx
| Category · Template |
| Traditionals |
|---|
| Park Bench · Freeze |
| Amazing Sphinx · World's Worst |
| Guessing Games |
| Dating Game · Late to Work |
| Party Quirks · Press Conference |
| Chain Death Murder |
| Pairs Games |
| Auctioneer · Foreign Film Dubs |
| Sports Announcers · Subconscious |
| Full Participation Games |
| 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1 · New Choice |
| Perpetual Machine · Questions |
| Superheroes · What Are You Doing? |
| Player/Observer Games |
| Slideshow · Half-life |
| Other |
| Electric Shock · Project Ektelo |
Amazing Sphinx is an Acting Improv game that sometimes replaces World's Worst as the last game of the activity period.
Participants
- Five people (sometimes 3, for ease of height order)
How does it work?
Amazing Sphinx involves three to five people positioned with increasing height in a line, facing straight; the person at the line's front sits, and the following people are positioned such that they become consecutively higher. Alternatively, the Sphinx can be made in a circle, which can be approached from any side and start answering with any head. The Amazing Sphinx is confronted with a question, which is usually preceded with something along the lines of "O, great and mighty/powerful Sphinx."
The Sphinx then answers from first person to the last person, each head uttering one word each. (However, the special case is the use of hyphens, in which you can say something like "Your-hyphen-mom".) If necessary, the first person continues after the last, and so on until the question has been sufficiently answered.
The Sphinx's parts have no idea what the other parts will say. The idea is to say something that the next person can continue off of. Vague words, especially heinous pronouns and heinous prepositions are good. For example, the third person should not finish the entire answer. The answer should be unreasonable.
The last AI of a given session of CTY traditionally features a game of Amazing Sphinx in which all the nomores participate as a part of the Sphinx.
Notable Moments
- With two male heads and one female head, or vice versa, a common question asked to the Sphinx was how it used the bathroom. Go figure.
- Some commonly used questions are: How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie-roll pop? How many roads must a man walk down? Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? etc.
- Joe asking the Sphinx who would win in a fight: Chuck Norris or Gandalf the Gray and Gandalf the White and Monty Python and the Holy Grail's Black Knight and Benito Mussolini and the Blue Meanie and Cowboy Curtis and Jambi the Genie, Robocop, the Terminator, Captain Kirk and Darth Vader, Lo Pan, Superman, every single Power Ranger, Bill S. Preston and Theodore Logan, Spock, the Rock, Doc Ock and Hulk Hogan? (LAN 07.1)
