Best party game?
I meant to get this an open discussion started weeks ago, when it would have been more timely. But it’s not too late, I figure. Like many people, one of the highlights of the holiday season for me is staying up late playing games with family and friends. And there’s still time for that, right?
Based on recommendations here at Kulturblog (and especially Bret’s very informative posts), last year we picked up Wits and Wagers, which has proven to be a solid game-night player. Anything else out there? I personally prefer the casual games that don’t require hours of playing time and can accommodate large groups. (We’ve also enjoyed Ticket to Ride, but it’s probably near my limit in terms of a required time commitment.) I’ll listen to all sorts of recommendations, though, and it goes without saying that it’s not all about me.
Posted on December 27, 2010, in Pop Culture. Bookmark the permalink. 39 Comments.
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Our family’s favorites are Hoopla (a Cranium game) and Apples to Apples.
Hoopla without fail always provides a moment that has people rolling on the floor with laughter and becomes an inside family joke.
I played it with my parents and my brother and his boyfriend on TG, and my Dad ended up being the one to provide the hilarity. He was giving clues for a card, and he warned us he had no idea what the card meant. His clues were: “It’s bigger than Israel, but smaller than an open mine.”
So we were trying to guess things like a tomb, desert, who knows. Finally we gave up.
The card? “Mosh pit.”
My dad thought the word “mosh” was Jewish, so he went with Israel, and then an open mine…pit.
Then there was the time my son drew a picture of someone going poo for the card, “Dump.”
Hey Greg, if there’s anything I can recommend with your specifications, I’d go with ‘Say Anything’ and maybe ‘Liar’s Dice’ from my list last December. Say Anything is like Apples to Apples but you make up your own things rather than pick from cards, so it can be a lot more personable and absolutely hilarious every time. Liar’s Dice (as seen on Pirates of the Caribbean) can be made from scratch if you have a bunch of dice (board can be printed off from Boardgamegeek.com under the ‘files’ of the game’s entry) or found at your local thrift store. The more dice, the more can play and the greater the craziness and fun.
Oh and thanks for the shout out! I’ve been lazy the last few months with my entries and wasn’t sure what to add for a holiday list this year but I hope those I’ve reviewed so far will keep helping people find good games that brings their friends and families back to the table:)
Say Anything sounds good. We’ve played a version of Liar’s Dice for years called Perudo and it’s a great game.
Follow up question: how do I locate a good game store in my area? Say Anything is available online, but doesn’t seem to be sold off the shelf at any of the local big-box merchants.
Susan M – I have to ask about Hoopla. We bought it but it seems to make no sense. It has a timer to try to beat but it makes no change based on how many players. If you can shed light on this maybe I’ll give it another shot.
Rage is good. Think card game where you take tricks with a trump suit (like hearts) and before each round you guess how many tricks you’ll take and your score is based on whether you manage to take the # of tricks you predicted in the round. Good for a medium size group.
Celebrity is my favorite. Everyone writes down famous people real or fictional. Two teams. First you go through all the names describing. Next you go through all the names only saying one word to describe. Last is cherades.
Loaded Questions is fun, but I just use the questions no the game board. Everyone writes their answer to a question and the guesser tried to figure out who said what.
Liar’s Dice is great too.
Thurn & Taxis great game. Smaller group. If you like Ticket to Ride you’d probably like this.
Nothing beats Uno
We’ve been playing non-stop Rock Band 3 and Kinect since Christmas morning, or at least my kids have. I think those would be good party games.
Clark, do you have that thing that shoots the cards out? We’ve played Uno with that thing for years and it is awesome.
We got Rock Band 3 for Christmas, too. It’s lots of fun, especially the keytar. One of my two guitars decided to finally call it quits, so I’m searching for a replacement (and discovering that they are hard to find–even though Rock Band helpfully makes all guitar controllers compatible).
I just figured out the other day that Uno is awfully similar to a game I used to play as a kid: Crazy 8s.
A friend of mine introduced us to a card game called Fluxx. Actually he introduced us to a version called Zombie Fluxx.
It’s actually a game for 2-5 people – I think four or five would be optimal.
So I guess it doesn’t qualify for a large party or a large group. But if your group fits within that size range, I can tell you that the game was a lot of fun.
jks: Everyone works together against the timer (this makes it a good game for people who are sore losers and even worse winners, like my husband and my son). We’ve never played with a large enough group that 15 minutes wasn’t enough time to win. We’ve lost before but if we’d been more on it we could have potentially won. I’d say if you’re playing with more than 4 people add 5 minutes, or something.
Cash N’ Guns is a party game that can accomodate a good # of folks, and the STRAIGHT, NO FRILLS version can be done in 15 minutes (there are add-ons and different mini-games you can play).
BANG! is a card RPG that takes 1-2 go rounds to get the hang of it, but can be quite fun as well.
I’m pretty sure we played Loaded Questions last year at a friend’s NYE party and it was a blast. I couldn’t remember what it was called, though. Thanks, JKS.
Based on Bret’s recommendation, I got Bohnanza (the bean card game) and it’s taken root in our family. Up to 7 can play, so it’s pretty good for a smallish crowd.
I just bought “Word on the Street” for my sis for Christmas. It looks like fun. It’s a team word game and you can have several people on each team. Each team tries to win letters by coming up with a word based on a prompt from a card. When you use a letter, it moves one space toward your side of the board. I think the idea of it is great, but I don’t know if it’s as fun in practice. I’m sure we’ll be playing it this week.
“Rage” is a good group card game. Our family calls it “Oh Earl” to avoid cussing in front of old ladies. It’s known by many different names, including “Oh Hell,” “Oh Shit,” and “Bust.”
Another shout out for Apples to Apples and Rock Band.
Also, you can never go wrong with Texas Hold’em.
One game my friends play when we get together:
A topic is chosen, i.e. what would your band name be, stripper name, what would you invent . . .
Then all the answers are put into a hat. They are all read, twice through. Then a person gets a chance to guess from any of the responses, who it was that answered that.
If you guess right, that person joins your team. If you guess wrong, it becomes that person’s chance to guess.
The game is won when someone collects every person onto their “team”.
The hard part is remembering all the responses (especially if there are more than 8 people playing).
Works well at parties, takes a decent amount of time, but you’ll only want to play one or two rounds before it dies off. I’m not sure if one of my friends came up with this game, or if it (or some version of it) has been around forever.
Another game we tried with my wife’s family this last weekend was Talk Show. It has a similar feel to Balderdash, but is based off of questions asked of players in the game. I thought it worked really well. It probably works best for smaller groups: 4-6 people.
Say Anything: I managed to get it half-off at Border’s back in November. We’ve only played it once, but it was a lot of fun. (Much better for me than Apples to Apples.)
We picked up a game for 2 different families for Christmas, but haven’t been able to play it yet: Telestrations. Gameplay goes like this: You pick a card, and draw a picture of the description on the card. The next person looks at your drawing, then writes a description. The next person draws a picture based on THAT description.
Rock Band 3 is a lot of fun, but we miss a few features from RB2. I got my wife the pro-cymbals set for the drums (her area of expertise) looking forward to that. Playing keyboard on songs like China Grove or Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting, just awesome. (Or doing harmonies on Bohemian Rhapsody!)
My wife recommends these 2 sites for getting games, reviews, etc.:
Board Game Geek http://www.boardgamegeek.com/
Time Well Spent http://www.timewellspentgames.com/
Telestrations sounds like a game we got for Christmas by Cranium called Scribblish. We tried it with four players but it didn’t work too well. I think it’d work best with a larger group.
You can buy “Things” at Wal-mart and other big retailers. It can be played by a large number of people, people can come-and-go during the game with no real problem, and it’s an absolute hoot to play, while it helps you get to know the other players better.
(to clarify… that’s Parker Brothers’ “Game of Things”… it comes in a wooden box, and everything you need is inside the box, including pencils)
Oh, for family fun (folks ages 11 or so and older), let me also suggest “Killer Bunnies” which has so addicted our family that every occasion brings a new set of add-on cards.
No, we don’t have any additions to the Uno game. Just a straight deck. The funnest thing to do if you have about 5 decks is play attack Uno. You combine them but if you have a duplicate (exact number and color) then anyone can play at anytime. Makes it a bit more raucous. Especially with draw-2s.
Is it just me, or is the interface on RockBand 3 not very intuitive at all?
FHL, I’m curious what you miss on RB2.
Greg, the interface doesn’t seem that different from RB2 to me, plus you can add and drop players mid-play without exiting the game, which is soooo much better.
Of course, I’m playing it on XBox 360. It may be different on Wii or PS3.
We have the procymbals drum set too. Our set up is exactly like a real drum set in every way. Now we just need the new guitar controllers and we’ll be just like a real band. We’re hoping to get groupies and drug habits too, just for the sake of realism.
RB3 seems fine if you’re just firing it up and playing quickplay. Maybe even better than RB2. But if you are creating a band with customized characters (me, my wife, and my two daughters) and want to use career mode, it’s extremely confusing. And the game booklet is completely useless. I just spent some time at the rockband.com forums, and can say for sure that this is an issue for lots of people on all three consoles. It seems that the answer is to create a separate profile for all four players (with a limit of four profiles maximum) and have each person create their character on that profile, then login every time they want to play. (At least, I’m hoping this will work. I haven’t tried it yet.) On RB2, you could just create some characters and whoever happened to be playing could access that character.
Oh, yeah, I haven’t created a character yet, I’ve just been doing quickplay. I need to check out what’s happening there. It seems odd they would make it harder when everything else seems to be so much simpler.
One reason may be that there was the possibilty of other players messing with your character. My son’s friends used to like to use my daughter’s character but dress her in skanky outfits. Maybe they’re trying to eliminate that possibility.
My boys learned how to play drums on Rock Band.
That’s one benefit from Rock Band, and it’s getting more pronounced with each update: you’re actually learning something and developing actual skillz.
The Kinect Dance Central game is the same way, you’re actually learning to dance and it’s really good exercise. My kids played it so long on Christmas weekend that they can’t move now from all the muscle soreness.
I am sure that we will hear of Kinect related deaths after New Years Eve.
My extended family had several intense rounds of Spot It on Christmas Day. It is a card game in which each card contains 8 symbols and exactly one symbol on each card will match any other card. There are several variations on the gameplay. It is very easy to learn and quickly addictive.
Anyone know of a good card game that’s as fun as Uno but teaches letters? (Uno has been great to teach numbers)
So I went on a quest to find Say Anything, but was unsuccessful. (Barnes and Nobel did stock it, but was sold out.)
Instead, I found a game kiosk in the mall that had everything reduced 50%. So I ended up getting three new games in an impulse buy:
• Telestrations – mentioned above, this game is kind of a combination of Pictionary and the telephone game. I think my kids will like this one.
• Loaded Questions – I’ve played this one before, and thought it was a blast. from memory, the cards/questing were a lot of fun, but the board game kind of dragged-although this was really incidental.
• Wise and Otherwise – I bought this one of the shield without knowing much about it, but it looks fun. A clue is read with the first part of a proverb from somewhere around the world, and the players try to come up with convincing endings (and also guess the correct one. I like these kind of games. And I like proverbs. So I figured it’s win-win.
Greg,
Sorry Barnes & Noble was sold out. I mean, that is a good sign, but I am sorry you could not get it. You can also get it at Borders.
Barring a local game store, online is your best best bet then. Target.com is a great place to get it, or Funagain.com
Sorry for your troubles getting the game! You will definitely dig it if you can ever get your hands on a copy.
Cheers,
Luke
PR Director
North Star Games
Luke, thanks for the tips. I called Borders and they said they didn’t have it. I noticed let’s of places are stocking the family version of Wits and Wagers. We’ be loved that game.
I’m a fan of Wise and Otherwise, but my wife doesn’t care for it. It’s in the same vein as Balderdash, except that it gives you the start of a proverb, and everyone tries to finish it. (As usual, these aren’t proverbs you’ve ever heard of, but try to imagine the responses you might get from “A Bird in the Hand…” if you didn’t know the ACTUAL response!)
RB3: Yeah, it’s that it kind of lacks the idea of a cohesive band. Now, you’re just a bunch of performers and EACH of you comes from a different band. The band that’s displayed is apparently from whoever clicked in first. I don’t know why they limited it to 4 profiles, either. I don’t know, maybe it works out better for playing online.
I agree, the manual is completely useless. There’s this rare event that happens where 1 or 2 bars glow like an extended note that’s really fat, no one knows how to play those.
Granted, there are some cool new features, like picking up players mid-song, or changing the difficulty level in the middle. I’m iffy on whether I get clothing/equipment from achievements instead of using awarded $$$.
Can’t wait to get a pro-guitar, it’s something to save up for. =)
Clark: Try Quiddler:
You start with 3 cards (letter or combination) and try to spell a word. You get more cards and try to either spell the longest word, or the most little words. It might work for you.
Ah, sounds good, except our kids can’t spell yet. We’re still teaching letters.
Clark: It’s not a game, but our two youngest learned their letters from They Might Be Giants’ “Here Come the ABC’s.” In fact,that was the only show our third child would watch at all, until we got “Here Come the 123′s.”
I think at some point we also had Sesame Street Bingo, which does teach letters. The bingo chips were Cookie Monster’s cookies.