Majority vote questions are the wildcard of Spylled. Unlike every other question type where there's a factually correct answer, majority vote questions reward you for predicting what most other players will choose.
In game theory, a Schelling point (or focal point) is the answer people tend to choose in the absence of communication. It's the "obvious" choice that most people gravitate toward naturally.
For example, if the majority vote question is "Name a color," most people will say blue or red — not chartreuse. If you pick blue, you're betting on the Schelling point, and you'll likely be right.
The skill in majority vote questions is recognizing what the Schelling point is for each specific question. Sometimes it's obvious. Sometimes it requires you to think about who else is playing and what they're likely to pick.
The biggest mistake players make is trying to be clever. If the question is "What's the best pizza topping?" and you pick truffle oil because you genuinely think it's the best — you'll probably lose that point. The majority is going to say pepperoni or margherita.
The winning strategy is to suppress your personal opinion and think: what would the average player choose? What's the most mainstream, obvious, uncontroversial answer?
We recently added fill-in-the-blank majority votes, where instead of picking from options, you type your answer freely. This makes it even more interesting because there are no predefined choices to anchor on.
The challenge here is spelling and phrasing. We normalize answers by trimming whitespace and converting to lowercase before counting, so "Pizza" and "pizza" count as the same answer. But "pizza" and "pizzas" don't — so keep it simple and singular.
Almost never. The math is simple: if 60% of players pick answer A, you have a 60% chance of getting the point by picking A. Going contrarian drops your odds. The only exception is if you have strong reason to believe the player base will be split — but even then, going with your gut instinct of "what's most obvious" is usually the best strategy.