During a recent game night at my place, we played a lot of my old-time party favorites, such as UNO and Just One. But before we got too far down the road, I made sure to break out Wavelength (2019, CMYK), my favorite party game of all time.

Wavelength is the game in the wildly colorful box you might have seen at a friend’s house, your local Target, or maybe through the game’s app, which is a standalone product that can be found in the App Store or Google Play. First, two teams are split as evenly as possible. On a turn, one player from the active team is named the Psychic for that round and has to select a scale from a card in the draw deck. Scales could be spectrums as simple as Hot/Cold, or something more challenging, like Better as a Book/Better as a Movie. There are dozens of double-sided cards included in the box, each with two terms used to define a spectrum of ideas.

The Psychic’s job is to give their team a clue that aligns with a randomly-spun result on a wheel showing points. The Psychic spins the wheel, looks at the result, shuts a cover that hides the result, then comes up with a clue that will hopefully give…

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I can remember several days in my personal history with Apples to Apples, such as the first time I played it and discovered that party games do not have to feel devoid of intellectual stimulation; the first time someone had some serious unintended innuendo come about with a play of a card. There was the time one of my best friends made a ten minute argument as to why Michael Jackson was the trump card in this game (i.e., he fits any nearly any adjective that can be played, and he fits them better than just about any other card could). But the one that I remember most was the day Apples to Apples started to wane in my game group’s rotation. More on that last date later; for now, let’s talk about what makes Apples to Apples tick.

The Game

Apples to Apples is, quite honestly, as simple as a game can get.

Players are dealt seven ‘red’ apple cards which have nouns printed on them (i.e., a person, place, thing, or event).

[caption id="attachment_296781" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A noun is a person, place, or thing.[/caption]

Players rotate being the judge, who will draw one ‘green’ apple card which has an adjective printed on it (i.e., a characteristic of a person,…

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I lead employee engagement for a food & beverage manufacturer when I’m not here talking games. At a recent lunch event, I decided to bring some of the games from my personal collection to the office to spur some laughs while we did yet another round of bland lunch catering.

I put my copy of Just One (2018, Repos Production) at one table, then waited to see if anyone would engage with it. I was pleasantly surprised to see members of our HR department sit at the table, read the short list of instructions, and dive right in.

Within seconds, you could see the magic beginning to form. Players used the (admittedly terrible) dry erase markers to begin following the game’s simple rules, putting one player in the hot seat while all other players used their easel to come up with a clue that hopefully no other player wrote on their dry erase easel.

When the HR team members not currently in the hot seat showed their words to each other, the usual amounts of surprise, cursing, and accusatory gestures took place. Left with only a word or two to come up with the answer, it was great to see the active player struggle to come up with the right word…and when they did, it was high fives…

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I would have told you that Decrypto had been out for way longer than five years. Like Just One, Decrypto arrived in 2018, out of the blue, and immediately established itself as a go-to word game. To think there was a year in which we received Decrypto and Just One. The heart quickens. We had no idea how good we had it.

To celebrate five years of success, Scorpion Masqué has released a 5th anniversary edition, spicing up the classic—board gaming has a short memory—with 440 new words. Does it change the game in any appreciable way? No, this is still very much the Decrypto people know and love. It does freshen things up a bit, though, for those who’ve put their copy of the original release through its paces.

It takes a round or two to get used to Decrypto’s structure, and it’s difficult to describe in absence of the game in front of you. What I’m trying to tell you is, what I describe may not sound fun. I assure you, it is.

The players are divided into two teams, each of which has four secret words that everyone on the team can see. Each round, one player on each team (the “Encryptor”) has a secret three digit code that they need their teammates to guess.…

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Tales from the Tavern

A group of evil monsters has stolen all the drinks in the land of Barcadia, and now it’s up to your merry band of adventurers to brave the dungeon and recover all the drinks. Or… something like that. Heroes of Barcadia is less about the narrative and more about the laughs and, of course, the drinks. What exactly is it, then?

Well, it’s a dungeon-crawling game for 2-6 players (or up to 8 with the expansion), but unlike many dungeon-crawlers, you’re in direct competition. These other heroes are not your allies; they are your rivals! After all, what good is recovering the lost hoard of stolen drinks if it’s not you getting all the glory? You’ll take turns exploring the dungeon to find power-ups and slay monsters. Once you have three power-ups, you can try to take on the final boss and recover the drink hoard.

As a game, it’s… pretty basic. Heroes of Barcadia keeps the gameplay dead simple. There’s very little room for strategy. The rooms you uncover, the power-ups you get, and the dice you roll to fight the monsters are all random. You have little control over your destiny here. It is less of a game and more of a classed-up, shiny new way to have fun with your friends and…

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I don’t enjoy failure, but I’ve come to believe that the best party games are the ones that constantly force you to fail. Just One is hard. Codenames can be crushingly difficult. In That’s Not a Hat!, failure is inevitable. Wavelength, Pan T’es Mort, Concept, I could go on. The specter of disaster looms. It often pummels you. Why do we play these, exactly?

I Know You Want It

Add to this fine tradition Broad Lines, a new cooperative party game from designer Piero Modolo and publisher Cranio Creations. Broad Lines seems to draw obvious inspiration from Just One, but instead of a word game, it applies the same general structure to Pictionary.

The active player, whomever that may be, draws a card and picks a number, which corresponds to a word. The goal of the group, it may not surprise you, is to get the active player to guess this word. The first player takes a square transparency and a dry erase marker, and draws one of two things: either a single curved line, or two straight lines. Once they’re done, the transparency gets placed on the provided easel, and the active player gets two guesses.

[caption id="attachment_294488" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Can you guess the word?[/caption]

Assuming they’re wrong, play continues…

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Sheep, dog, and sheepdog games have had a bumpy ride in the Bell household.

Wilson & Shep was a cute hidden movement game that my kids never latched onto. Good Dog, Bad Zombie was certainly more good than bad. Sheepy Time was OK. Adult games featuring sheep, like Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small or Glen More II: Chronicles, have always landed well, particularly any game that features “sheeple” wooden meeples as a spendable resource.

The newest entry in the sheep/dog/sheepdog category? Wool Gang (2023, Gigamic) is a family-weight card game that landed somewhere in the middle. Wool Gang has a cool box, quick rounds, and great card art by Pauline Berdal. In other words, it’s a solid production.

As a game? Wool Gang (designed by Jérôme Bodin) never crossed the threshold from mildly interesting to above average.

Spin the (Points) Wheel

Wool Gang is a set collection card game for 2-5 players. Once a player crosses 20 points (tracked using a points wheel that displays each player’s current score), that round becomes the final round of the game, and the player with the most points wins.

Each round of Wool Gang plays the same. The entire deck of action cards and sheep…

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“I’m surprised this flick made it to theaters.”

I find myself uttering that line from time to time, especially when I see a film featuring actors I’ve heard of. I get it—it’s called “the movie business” for a reason, and that means that sometimes studios release films because they need to make a quick buck.

Bravo Bravo (2023, Randolph) elicited the same sort of comments during recent plays with my two kids (a nine-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son). It feels like a game that exists only to further the business of making money, because it is a terrible product.

A somewhat shocking moment occurred when my daughter made the following comment after our first play of Bravo Bravo:

“This isn’t really a game, right?”

Bravo Bravo is a bit like the vastly superior Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, published by Dolphin Hat Games. In both games, a card is revealed, and players have to say a certain word (or, like Dolphin Hat’s also-superior 800 Pound Gorilla, perform a certain gesture). If they say the wrong word or dance the wrong dance, there’s a penalty.

[caption id="attachment_292751" align="alignnone" width="768"] Meet "Steve"[/caption]

In Bravo Bravo, here’s the ruleset: when…

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On the one hand, there is no reason to write a full length review for a game like Six Second Scribbles. There isn’t all that much to say. In fact, if I’m being honest, I considered writing the review before I even cracked the shrink on the cards—I was that sure of the outcome. 

On the other hand, when a game’s design so perfectly reflects not only the personality on the box but that of its corporate publishing identity, it deserves a unique header on the website and an extra paragraph or two to celebrate the accomplishment. 

Six Second Scribbles is the creation of Hazel Reynolds of Gamely Ltd, a Brighton, UK publisher. The Gamely philosophy includes small boxes, laughter, a manageable carbon footprint, and charity. I really want to like games from a company like Gamely. How pleasant, then, when the little yellow (which is also metaphorically green) box is a smash hit at the table. 

Laugh track

There are three decks of cards in Six Second Scribbles: Easy, Tricky, and Almost Impossible. Each player receives a face-down card that lists ten items under a single category. With one minute on the clock, players must flip and then draw as many items as possible using a golf pencil and a rather small piece of paper. 

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Any time I get the chance to play yet another one-shot murder mystery / escape room game, I am down!

During our meetings with dV Giochi / DV Games at SPIEL 2023, I had the chance to chat with Barbara, our contact with the publisher. While our conversation was brief, we talked about my coverage of some other one-shot mystery games that hit the sweet spot for me. These include the Exit: The Game series, Unsolved Case Files, the Cold Case series, the Suspects games and a few other titles.

Barbara listened as I spoke about my bonafides, and our conversation ended with a review copy of the new mystery game Alibi. Alibi is an interesting package: it includes three one-shot cases that each take about an hour to play. Each player takes on the role of a suspect in a murder case and is given a very small deck of cards with their character story and background during setup.

Alibi is essentially a five-player-only game, with a six-player variant where one person takes on the persona of a detective who seems a bit like Hercule Poirot, the hero from the Agatha Christie mystery novels.

Like a good dinner party murder mystery game, no one knows if they are the murderer or not…

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To Be (Chicken) or Not To Be (Chicken)

Chicken! does not pretend to be anything other than what it says on the tin. The game comes in a small cylindrical tube adorned with artwork of foxes, chickens, farmers, and eggs. That’s pretty much the whole experience. In the game, players roll dice on each turn and can press their luck to score the most points (see: chickens). The first player to reach 25 points is the winner. It’s a fairly straightforward concept.

On your turn, players are passed some number of dice and must roll them all. You set aside any chickens or foxes you roll, leaving you with some blank dice or eggs. For every egg you roll, you must “hatch” (add) a die to your pool from the middle of the board. You then have the option to reroll all non-chicken, non-fox dice to press your luck. The catch, of course, is that if you ever roll three foxes, the foxes have raided the henhouse, and your turn is over, scoring zero points.

To mitigate this risk, Chicken! offers each player the opportunity to, well, “chicken out.” At the start of your turn, you can take a one-point penalty. If you do, you can reset the dice…

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The beauty of trying so many games each year is that you know it immediately when you play a winner.

Such was the case with my first play of Everything Ever (2023, Floodgate Games), which took place with Floodgate’s marketing lead, Ian Birdsall, at Gen Con 2023. Ian, along with myself and two complete strangers at the con, played almost a full game while standing at a demo table.

It was the perfect movie, in a sense, even though this was a game in real life: action, drama, comedy, a couple of sweet moments, and rap songs. Ian was gracious enough to provide a review copy after the play, allowing me to see if the gameplay would be replicated in my home environment.

Additional plays only cemented my initial thoughts. Everything Ever is great.

Every Rule

Each of Everything Ever’s 250 cards feature the word Every and then something else from the world you might already know well. “Everything That’s Orange.” “Everything That Has a Hook.” “Every Bird.” “Every Character on ‘The Office.” “Every Disney Villain.” You get the idea.

A draw deck of three cards per player is set in the middle of the table, then the first two cards are revealed. Each player begins play…

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How do you rate a board game like Monikers? Much like Wolfgang Warsch’s The Mind, which took an old theatre camp game and committed it to paper, Monikers is a curated rendition of an old favorite. I have always called it Salad Bowl. You may know it as The Name Game, The Hat Game, Celebrities, or a number of other options. How do you review something that’s always been there? How, exactly, does one review Charades?

A Rose by Any Other Moniker

In the traditional game, the first stage involves handing out slips of paper and pens, on which everyone writes a word. These can be famous people, events, concepts, whatever you want, really. Like most party games, the exact parameters are up to the group.

Monikers elides that. The box is full of cards with pre-printed prompts, like Oprah, The Kraken, A Russian Nesting Doll. You know, the classics. From there, the structure is identical to the original game. In lieu of pieces of paper, each player is dealt a pile of cards, from which they choose whichever appeal to them. Those cards are shuffled into a deck, which is set in the…

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