Against the Flow
Guess what the minority wants
1
A question is shown on screen with two possible answers.
2
Choose an answer - your goal is to land with the minority.
3
Land with the majority, you drink.
Tie? A coin flip picks one answer - everyone who chose it drinks.
Tie, and the coin landed on your answer
Against the Flow takes Go with the Flow and turns it inside out. Same setup, a question with two answers, but now you win by being on the smaller side, and the crowd drinks. It sounds like the same game in reverse, and it is not: when everyone tries to be contrarian, the contrarian answer becomes the popular one, and the room ties itself in knots trying to think one level deeper than everyone else.
1
Assume everyone else is also trying to be in the minority. The obvious unpopular answer is often where the whole room ends up, which makes it the majority.
2
The safest play is usually the honest one. When the table is busy out-thinking itself, the person who just answers the question truthfully lands on the small side surprisingly often.
3
Ties go to a coin flip and the losing side drinks. In a room of four or six, a split is likely, so do not celebrate until the coin has landed.
4
Do not over-think a question with a genuinely lopsided answer. If nine out of ten people really would pick one option, the minority is right there and it is not clever to avoid it.
1
Mixed mode: the host alternates Go with the Flow and Against the Flow without announcing which is which until the reveal. Chaos, in a good way.
2
Show your work: minority winners explain what they expected the room to do. It teaches the table how each player thinks, which makes the next round harder.
3
Lone wolf: if exactly one player lands in the minority, everyone else has to say out loud what they expected the room to do. The explanations are usually worse than the guesses.
Against the Flow is a pure prediction game. The scoring already rewards the good reads, so it plays at full strength for points, and it is great for a room where the drinkers and the drivers want to play the same game together.