The obvious pile
Animal prompts have the strongest crowd effect in the game. Children’s books, cartoons and zoos have taught everyone the same dozen creatures, and they come to mind first. That is why those animals score so low. Your aim is to get one step into the less-rehearsed part of your knowledge.
Think in habitats, not in animals
Instead of searching your memory for animals, pick a place and look around it. A pond has newts, dragonflies, water boatmen and herons. A desert has jerboas, fennec foxes and sidewinders. The deep sea has anglerfish and giant squid. The seashore has limpets, barnacles and sea anemones. Habitat thinking turns one hard question into several easy ones.
Four more tricks
- Go smaller. Insects, spiders, worms and shellfish are real animals and are named far less often than mammals.
- Go more specific. A breed, subspecies or colour form can be a better answer than the species. If you know a particular kind of owl, fish or snake, use it.
- Go regional. Animals from another continent, or from your own countryside, are often unfamiliar to players elsewhere. A native animal you know from childhood may be exotic to everyone else.
- Use the animals of stories and heraldry. Dodos, thylacines and other extinct animals are real and appear in many prompts; check the prompt wording to see if they are allowed.
An example in practice
Suppose the prompt is “Name an animal” and you freeze. Choose a habitat, perhaps a river. In your head you walk along the bank: a kingfisher on a branch, a dragonfly over the water, a water vole in the bank, a pike lurking under the surface, a heron standing in the shallows. Any one of those would score far higher than the first answers that came to mind, and you found them with a single image.
A note on names
Some animals have several names (a puma, a cougar and a mountain lion are one animal). Thin Air accepts common alternatives where we know them, so type the one you know best. For animals with male, female and young names, the species name is usually the safest to type.
Keep an eye on the wording
Different prompts ask for different kinds of animal: a farm animal, a zoo animal, a sea creature, an insect, a bird. The more specific the prompt, the narrower the crowd, so the first answers are less overwhelming and the rarer ones are easier to reach. When the prompt is the broad “Name an animal”, remember that the whole list is open to you, and the crowd is at its strongest.
If the clock is nearly out, a mid-range answer you know is correct beats a dazzling one you are unsure of. See how to score higher for the full rhythm of a 25-second prompt.