Most Likely To Awards: Superlatives for Any Group

Most likely to awards are group superlatives: a list of playful predictions like "most likely to reply to an email at 2 a.m." that a group votes on and then reads aloud, one winner per category. The rule that makes them work is simple. Write enough categories that everyone receives exactly one, and never write a category that could hurt the person who wins it.

They started as a yearbook tradition and have since spread to offices, sports teams, bachelorette weekends, family reunions, and end-of-season banquets, because they do something few group activities manage: they tell each person that the group noticed something specific about them.

What separates awards from the party game

There are two related things sharing the same phrase, and mixing them up is why some events fall flat.

The party game is the rapid-fire version. Someone reads a prompt, everyone points at a person at the same time, and the group laughs at the consensus. It is fast, low stakes, and disposable. Nothing is written down, and the whole point is the moment.

The awards are the ceremonial version. Categories are decided in advance, voting happens privately, results are held back, and the reveal is the event. Someone reads the category, pauses, and names the winner. Often there is a certificate or a small trophy.

The game is a way to fill twenty minutes. The awards are a keepsake. If you want people to remember it next year, run the awards. If you want to warm up a room, run the game, and a most likely to game that supplies the prompts for you saves the ten minutes you would spend inventing them on the spot.

Writing categories that land

The best categories are specific to the group. "Most likely to be famous" is generic and forgettable. "Most likely to bring a homemade cake to a meeting nobody asked for cake at" is a memory, and it will get read aloud again years later.

Specificity comes from observation. Before you write anything, spend ten minutes listing the small recurring things people in the group actually do. Who always arrives last. Who fixes the printer. Who has strong opinions about the thermostat. Who sends the long messages. Those observations become categories almost word for word.

Then run each one through a single test: would the winner be happy to have this read out in front of everyone? If the honest answer is "probably, if they are in a good mood," rewrite it. The category should be safe on a bad day, not just a good one.

Categories to avoid entirely. Anything about appearance, weight, money, relationship status, drinking, intelligence, or job performance. These feel funny while you are writing them and land badly in a room. There is no version of "most likely to get fired" that is kind, and one such category can sour an entire evening.

Categories that always work. Habits, hobbies, harmless quirks, small acts of competence, and improbable hypothetical futures. Most likely to survive a week without a phone. Most likely to know a guy who can fix it. Most likely to have snacks in their bag right now. Most likely to still be doing this in thirty years.

Making sure everyone gets one

This is the part most groups skip, and it is the part that decides whether the awards feel warm or exclusionary.

Count the people. Write at least that many categories. Then, when the votes come in, do not simply hand out whatever the raw tally produced, because a few charismatic people will win four awards each and a third of the room will win nothing. Sitting through twenty awards and receiving none is a genuinely bad experience, and people remember it.

The fix is straightforward. Take the results, and where somebody has won multiple categories, give them their strongest one and award the others to the runner-up. Nobody in the room will know, and everybody leaves with something. If a person still has no category, write one for them by hand. This is not cheating. The goal is recognition, not statistical accuracy.

For very large groups, split into teams or departments and run awards within each. Forty awards read consecutively is an endurance test regardless of how good the categories are.

Running the vote

Private voting produces better results than shouting. When people vote out loud, the first answer anchors everyone else, and you end up measuring who spoke first rather than what the group thinks.

A simple paper ballot works: print the categories with a blank line beside each, hand them out, collect them, and tally. Twenty minutes for a group of twenty. An online form is faster and lets you tally automatically, which matters if you are reading results the same evening.

Give people a nomination round first if you have time. Ask everyone to suggest three categories a week before, then pick the best twenty. Categories written by the group are always sharper than categories written by one organizer, and the nomination round quietly generates most likely to ideas you would never have thought of alone.

Keep the results genuinely secret until the reveal. Someone always asks, and the answer is always no. The surprise is most of the value.

The reveal

Read the category first, let it sit for a beat, then name the winner. That pause is doing real work. It gives the room a second to guess, which is where the laughter comes from.

Have something physical to hand over. A printed certificate, a paper crown, a small ridiculous trophy that gets passed on next year. The object turns a spoken moment into something people photograph and keep.

Order matters more than people expect. Open with two or three easy, funny categories to set the tone. Put the warmest ones in the middle. Save one genuinely touching category for last, because whatever you end on is the feeling people leave with.

Keep the whole thing under about twenty-five minutes. Awards run long and rooms tire, and a ceremony that overstays turns a good idea into a slog. If you have more categories than time, cut them rather than rushing the reveals.

How different groups use them

Classrooms and yearbooks. The original setting. Teachers running these should vet the category list themselves before voting, and should quietly ensure every student receives one. Peer voting in a school setting will otherwise concentrate awards on the same handful of popular students.

Offices and teams. Keep everything strictly outside performance. Awards about work quality become a shadow performance review, and people take them more seriously than you intend. Stick to snacks, calendars, coffee, and the meeting-room thermostat.

Sports teams. The end-of-season banquet is the natural home for these. Pair each serious award with a silly one, so the same evening honors the top scorer and crowns whoever is most likely to lose a water bottle in a single afternoon.

Bachelorette and bachelor parties. Very effective, with one caution. The couple's families are often present, so write for the most conservative person in the room and the night stays fun for everyone.

Family reunions. Generational categories work beautifully here. Most likely to tell the same story twice. Most likely to be found asleep in a chair by four in the afternoon. These get repeated for years.

Most likely to superlatives that suit any group

If you are starting from nothing, these shapes adapt to almost any room. Most likely to be awake at 3 a.m. Most likely to have a strong opinion about a small thing. Most likely to say yes to a plan and mean it. Most likely to know the way without a map. Most likely to bring a spare of something nobody thought to bring. Most likely to remember every birthday. Most likely to start a project at midnight. Most likely to be right about the weather.

Each of those can be sharpened by replacing the generic noun with something particular to the group. The generic version is a starting point, not the finished category.

When funny most likely to awards go too far

Searches for most likely to awards funny and funny most likely to awards outnumber the plain version, which tells you what people want. Funny is the goal. But there is a line, and it is easier to find than most people think.

The test is who the joke is about versus who it is at. A category about a harmless quirk is a joke about a person, shared with them. A category about a flaw is a joke at a person, shared around them. The first gets a laugh from the winner. The second gets a laugh from everyone except the winner, and that is the version people remember for the wrong reasons.

The other reliable rule: if writing the category required you to check whether the person could take it, do not use it. Genuinely safe categories never prompt that question.

One last practical note. Whoever organizes the awards should not be the person who reads them out and also the person who wins the most. Split those roles. It removes any suspicion about the tally and it lets the organizer enjoy the reveal too.

A timeline for organizing them

The awards themselves take twenty minutes. The preparation is where they are won or lost, and spreading it over two weeks costs almost no effort.

Two weeks out. Ask the group to nominate categories. Keep the request short and give an example, because a blank request produces nothing and one example produces twenty. Collect them somewhere you can actually read later.

One week out. Write the final list. Combine near-duplicates, cut anything that failed the kindness test, and add categories by hand for anyone the nominations overlooked. Count your list against your headcount.

Four days out. Send the ballot. Give people a deadline two days before the event, not the morning of, because a third of any group replies on the last possible day and you need time to tally.

Two days out. Tally, redistribute duplicates, and make the certificates. Handwriting them is slower and noticeably better received than printing.

On the day. Decide the running order, brief whoever is reading, and check that the certificates are in that order in a stack. Fumbling through a pile of paper between awards is what turns a tight ceremony into a long one.

The only step people skip is the redistribution, and it is the one that matters most. Everything else is logistics. That step is the difference between a ceremony the whole group enjoyed and one that a few people enjoyed while everyone else clapped.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many most likely to awards should I write for a group? At least one per person, and ideally a few more so you have flexibility when redistributing duplicates. For a group of twenty, write twenty-five categories, then trim to twenty during the reveal if the room is running out of energy.

Who's most likely to be upset by a superlative, and how do I avoid it? Anyone whose category touches appearance, money, relationships, or job performance. Restrict categories to harmless habits, small competences, and improbable futures, and the risk drops to almost nothing regardless of how well you know the group.

Who's the most likely to win multiple awards, and should I allow it? Outgoing, visible people almost always win several on raw votes. Redistribute the extras to runners-up so that everyone receives exactly one, since the point of the exercise is recognition spread across the group rather than an accurate tally.

Can I run the awards over a video call? Yes, and it works better than most remote activities. Collect votes with a form beforehand, share your screen with one category at a time, and mail or email the certificates afterward so people still end up with the physical keepsake.