The challenge for new party games is that (in general) the game’s concept needs to be easily conveyed so that the intended audience of casual players can quickly grasp it and jump in, while at the same time the concept needs to be distinct from what’s been released previously. After all, why release a game that’s identical to, say, Scattergories when that game has been on the market continually for more than three decades?
Although, honestly, that longevity might be a reason to release something similar to Scattergories. The market is already there, and maybe it wants something in the same ballpark.
With that in mind, let’s look at a few new party games:
• Without Fail is a new design from Elan Lee and Exploding Kittens, with assistance from designers Carol Mertz and Ian Clayman, that can be summarized as “Name That Tune”, but for other people…and not for tunes.
Maybe this explanation will make more sense:
The game includes 150 challenges that involve props like a blindfold, cups and balls, dice, pens, and more – all provided in the game box. The challenges are simple, but there’s a catch: Before a player begins a challenge, their friends bet on how difficult the challenge can be made without failing. The friend who makes the challenge the hardest becomes that player’s teammate, and they both score if the player can successfully complete the challenge.
Some of the components
However, if they upped the stakes too high and the challenger fails, then all other players earn a point, and the challenger and their teammate both lose points. Success is based entirely on whether players are good judges of their friends’ abilities.
• Following on the heels of a Spiel des Jahres nomination for Fun Facts, publisher Repos Production has announced a new party game for release in 2023: Champions!, a game for 3-8 players from Frank Crittin, Grégoire Largey, and Sébastien Pauchon. The pitch:
In each round, you try to predict which characters — ranging from public figures to fictional characters…or even family members — will win their duels, and which single character will end up the champion in the grand finale.
These are the types of duels you must judge: Who has been kicked out of a deal: Frankenstein or the boss? Who likes pineapple on pizza: Beyoncé or Grandma? Who has a picture of themselves as their phone wallpaper: Super Mario or Marie-Antoinette? Put yourself in the shoes of the other players and anticipate their votes, scoring points when you’re correct. Betting on the right champion will earn you a bonus, then you head into the next round with a new batch of characters…
• Get the Ick is the latest release from Big Potato Games, with players trying to guess which of three distasteful situations grosses out the active player, so a “guess what someone else is going to guess” situation.
You can also tag a situation as being something that you secretly enjoy, with others scoring bonus points if they discover your weird quirk.
• Maudit Mot Dit is a party game from Laurent Prin, Nathalie Saunier, Rémi Saunier, and Cocktail Games in which you try to get people to guess the right word, but only at the right time.
On your turn, you open the box, flip the top card of one stack onto the other stack, then choose one of the two words that you must make other players guess. The challenge is that you must give clues so that a player guesses that word only after exactly that many clues — not more and not fewer! If a player guesses the word correctly on the targeted clue, then the clue giver and word guesser each score points equal to the number of clues given; if someone guesses the word early, then only that player scores points; if no one guesses the word at the right time, the clue giver is penalized.
The title roughly translates to “Cursed Word Said”, and the publisher tells me that versions in other languages are planned for the future. Good luck to Cocktail Games on finding the wordplay in the titles of those versions!
