The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Tonight we played a game of things. That game is called The Game of Things. It is certainly a party game! We had a lot of fun with it, but I really wonder about how it’s built and if it could be built better.

A Game of Things is strongly based on that fantastic party game Balderdash. One player will draw and read a writing prompt. It will be something like “The worst thing to fall into” or “The best gift for a mother” or whatever. Each player, including the person who drew the card, will make up an answer and write it down. The person who drew the card is the “dasher” and will read out everyone’s answer, including their own, to each player. Play goes around the table, and each person tries to match one answer to one writer (the person reason is not someone you can accuse, so their answer is simply a red herring for the round). If you’re matched up, you can no longer accuse anyone when it becomes your turn. Each time you successfully make a match, you get a point and get to go again. Also, the last person to make a match gets two extra points, just because they weren’t already getting enough points for getting a freebie final point. Then you pass the reader role onward, and continue this way until everyone has read once.

On the surface, this seems like it could be a lot of fun. Trying to out-think what your friends would decide to write for these sorts of questions is a fun social game with a good crowd. However, it really lacks what Balderdash has: objectives.

In most of our games of Balderdash, things get super silly super fast, and we end up throwing around inside jokes and writing things down to make the dasher say embarrassing things and so on. That’s all in good fun, and why I enjoy playing so much, but all the while, there’s still an objective involved. There’s always going to be one or two people who actually attempt to create a fake definition, since you know there’s going to be the true one in there, and you might as well grab a ton of points from being one of the only two legit options. The basic game objective isn’t completely forgotten.

In Game of Things, there is really no motivation to actually responding to the prompt given. You can write anything, and it doesn’t affect the game at all. As long as your ridiculous non-sequitur could have been written by someone else, you’re home free. The “dasher” honestly has even more motivation to write something not at all related to the prompt, as it makes which one is the red herring all the harder to deduce.

Again, I will say, it was a fun time. We laughed a lot, and I was very entertained. But a game that kind of actively encourages not actually playing it doesn’t seem like a good game to me. At that point, we were just enjoying the witty brainchildren of the other players, and the game was just kind of an excuse. It wasn’t a game at all. At the same time, forcing everyone to play it straight wouldn’t have been nearly as fun, whereas I could see a “forced seriousness” game of Balderdash being quite entertaining and strategic. It just comes off seeming like a hollow excuse to socialize, instead of an actual game. But hey, sometimes, that’s what you need, I suppose.