An electronic version of '20 Questions' created by a Bermuda-based company has been a holiday sell-out at stores and on websites across North America.

Bermuda-based Radica Games unveiled the battery-powered 20Q game earlier this year to rave reviews from kids and industry experts. Toy stores here did not carry it, but most major retail websites across North America currently report the game as sold out.

The game works the same way as the old-fashioned version of '20 Questions' where players think of an object and the machine asks 20 questions to try to figure out what it is. 20Q can only identify about 2,000 objects, but Radica says that number represents about 98 percent of the objects users select when they play the game.

Robin Burgener, an Ontario, Canada-based inventor, developed 20Q from an online version of '20 Questions' which may still be played at www.20q.net. Radica Games says the website game currently plays more than 12,000 games per day and continues to learn new objects and hone its skills through playing and analysing the results from the games played. The retail version of 20Q has taken the most popular items to create what Radica Games says is "an addictive and sometimes uncannily accurate pocket mind-reader!"