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Haunted Bot Boo-Bot learned the wrong rule. Find it, then fix the photos it learned from.
Boo-Bot hands a ghost cookie to every guest in a ghost costume. It learned from last year's party photos, where every ghost also happened to be white, or out at night, or yelling Boo. So which rule did it really learn? Detectives find the rules that fit the photos, test guests on Boo-Bot to catch the wrong one, then fix the photos so only the right rule fits. A spooky-not-scary Halloween mystery about spurious correlations, the shortcut every AI can take.
2–6 players · ~8–14 + parents · ~10 per case min · screen-free
What this teaches
Print tonight
Guest, Rule and Case cards on Avery 5388 at Actual Size / 100% (never Fit to page). Print the grown-up guide on plain paper for whoever plays Boo-Bot. You also need one die and a pencil.
How to play
Boo-Bot hands a ghost cookie to every guest in a ghost costume. It learned from last year's party photos, but in those photos the ghosts all had something else in common too. So Boo-Bot may have learned the wrong rule. Work out which rule it learned, then fix its photos so only the right rule fits: a ghost is anyone wearing a SHEET.
Quick start — read this, start playing
- One player is Boo-Bot and takes the grown-up guide. Everyone else is a detective. Lay out the 6 Rule cards face up and draw the team's 5 pumpkins on scrap paper.
- Read a Case card aloud and lay out its photos. Detectives: turn face down every Rule card that doesn't fit. A rule fits when every ghost photo has its clue and no other photo does.
- Boo-Bot secretly rolls the die to see which fitting rule it learned. Detectives show Boo-Bot one guest from the leftover pile. Boo-Bot says BOO! (a ghost cookie) or No cookie. Each test costs 1 pumpkin.
- When you know the rule, say it. Then fix the photos: add guests from the pile until only SHEET fits. Each added guest costs 1 pumpkin. Pumpkins left = your score.
- That's the whole game. Everything below is for when a question comes up.
Setup
- Pick one player to be Boo-Bot. Boo-Bot keeps the grown-up guide folded so the detectives can't see it. A grown-up is a great Boo-Bot the first time.
- Lay out the 6 Rule cards face up: SHEET, WHITE, MOON, FOG, BOO, CANDY. Shuffle the 21 Guest cards into a face-up pile everyone can look through.
- Draw 5 pumpkins on a scrap of paper. That's the team's score for this case.
Open a case
- Pick a Case card and read its story aloud. Pull its photo guests out of the pile and lay them in a row. Those are the photos Boo-Bot learned from.
- Find the suspects. For each Rule card, check every photo: does every ghost have that clue, and does no other guest have it? If not, turn the card face down. You should have 3 suspects left, always including SHEET.
- Boo-Bot looks up the case in the guide and rolls the die. That's the rule it learned. It never says which.
Test Boo-Bot
- Detectives pick any guest from the pile (not the photos) and show it to Boo-Bot.
- Boo-Bot checks only its secret rule: if the guest has that clue, it says BOO! and hands over a cookie. If not, it says No cookie. Cross out 1 of the team's pumpkins.
- Turn face down every suspect that would have answered differently. Keep testing until one suspect is left, or guess early.
- Say your answer out loud. Wrong guess: cross out 2 pumpkins and keep testing. Right guess: Boo-Bot cheers and shows the guide.
Fix the photos
- Now fix the training data, even if Boo-Bot got lucky and learned SHEET. Wrong rules still fit the photos, so next year's bot could learn them.
- Add guests from the pile to the photo row, one at a time. Each one costs 1 pumpkin. Stop when SHEET is the only rule that fits.
- Pumpkins left = your score for the case. Run out and the case scores 0. Play the next case with a fresh 5.
How to score
- Each case starts at 5 pumpkins. Tests and fix cards cost 1, a wrong guess costs 2.
- A sharp team never needs more than 2 tests or 1 fix card per case, so 2 or more pumpkins is a perfect case.
- Play all six cases for a full party. Add up your pumpkins and try to beat it next Halloween.
Tips
- Every case has 3 suspects, and with good tests 2 is always enough. Testing random guests needed more than 2 in 30% of 3,600 practice games.
- Pick a guest who has one suspect's clue but not another's. Whatever Boo-Bot says, a suspect goes face down.
- A guest who has every suspect's clue, or none of them, gets the same answer from every rule, so it tells you nothing. That was 11% of the guests in the pile.
- To fix the photos, look for one guest who isn't a ghost but has both wrong clues. One card like that fixes every case.
What the game teaches
- A model learns whatever rule fits its training examples. It can't tell which pattern you meant.
- When the examples share an accident (every ghost photo was taken at night), a wrong rule fits just as well as the right one. That's called a spurious correlation, or a shortcut.
- You find a shortcut by testing the model on new examples that split the rules apart, like a ghost in daylight.
- The fix is better data: add examples that break the accident, like a white snowman. A bigger pile of the same photos wouldn't help.
- In a famous experiment, researchers trained a model on wolf photos that all had snow in them, and it learned that snow means wolf.
Variants
- Rival detectives: take turns picking the test. Whoever names the rule first keeps the Case card. Most Case cards wins.
- Be the trainer: pick five photos yourself so that three rules fit, and challenge a friend to find which one you're thinking of.
- Big kids: skip the suspects step. Test from the start and see how many tests it takes.
Downloads
Instruction sheet
Plain paper · 1 page · 8.5 × 11
One 8.5 × 11 page for the table — quick start, setup, turns, and scoring.
Full rules
Plain paper · duplex · 2 pages
Same game, longer type — plus what the cards teach and the variants.
Grown-up guide
Plain paper · 1 page · 8.5 × 11
For whoever plays Boo-Bot: the secret die table for every case, an answer key, and questions to talk about.
Guest, Rule + Case cards (Avery 5388)
Avery 5388 · 11 sheets
21 party guests, 6 rules Boo-Bot might have learned, and 6 case files.
Rules preview
Same rules as above, laid out for the table. Keep a printed copy face-up while you score.
On a phone, open the PDF in a new tab — in-page previews are unreliable in mobile Safari.
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