So, I’ve talked a lot before about Party Games and kind of how I dislike a number of the popular ones. I’ll recap this quick here, but I want to bring in some ideas as to what some better party or bigger group games might be with the holidays coming up. Gatherings might not be as large this year, but if you have a family unit who is coming together for the holidays, you might be looking at gaming, and I’ll also point out ones that work out well digitally with a couple of web cams, one for the table and one for the players.

Let’s start out by talking about what a “party” game is. Party games are meant to be an activity that you can do while still being socially engaged at the table or wherever you are playing it. These games might be a little bit about keeping points, but they are mainly meant to be fun activities for people to do together so that you don’t end up spending all your time watching sporting events, movies, or being apart everyone doing their own thing.

Now, most common party games, the likes of Apples to Apples, Cards Against Humanity, What Do You Meme, etc. They have a few fatal flaws to them. One, some of them just won’t work in the wrong group, most of them in fact can have that problem. Apples to Apples might be too tame for some, while others might be too dirty. But taking that aside, they also have another issue, they are based off of what you are doing with the cards and the jokes already given to you on the cards. That means, in the most case, once you’ve played it a few times, you’ve gone through a lot of the cards and you now you know the jokes that are coming up and there are certain cards, in the meta of the group, that might always win. So eventually those games start to become stale. They also tend to be based more off of very specific types of humor and humor being the very important part to the game.

What I’m going to suggest are games that might not have the same humor, some very well might, but are a step up and provide more interesting things about them.

Wits & Wagers

One type of party game that I didn’t mention above, but has a similar problem, is trivia. Trivia games, while I can do okay at them, I did win $15 from work recently in a few trivia games, have one inherent flaw to them. You either know the answer or you don’t. If you don’t know your state capitols or you don’t know sports, movies, music, pop culture, you are going to get those questions wrong. I can’t tell you who is in N’Sync vs the Backstreet Boys, no matter how many guesses you give me to figure out who the bad boy in each group was. Wits & Wagers kind of solves that problem. In Wits & Wagers all of the answers are numerical. Now, that doesn’t help too much if you are asked to figure out what year the first car went over 100 MPH or how many goals Pele had in his pro career. But you don’t need to get it right, you just need to guess the best you can. Then, all the answers are placed out, and everyone bets on what they think the right answer, depending on what it is, you get a payout and you do that for seven rounds, whomever has the most money at the end wins. So if you think that I know cars, you can bet on my car date, if I think you know pop music trivia dates better, I can bet on yours, so you never need to know the correct answer.

Online: I think that this one can work online. To do it, the person with the game would need to write down peoples numbers and handle moving peoples bets around, but it wouldn’t be hard to do.

Stipulations

This game, for me, is a an upgrade from the Cards Against Humanity and Apples to Apples style game. If you want to have the game that has the jokes, this one is going to be a solid choice. The difference is, instead of getting an answer to use to the question, you have to come up with your own. How it works is that one person, the person who is it, picks from either a super power, dream job, lifetime supply, or dream fulfilled and everyone writes a Stipulation for it. Because you are coming up with your own answers, you can tailor the humor to your group. If someone picks the super power of flight, you can make it as clean or as dirty as you want for the stipulation. This also mean that the game is less likely to become stale as well because you are using your own creativity to come up with something, let’s use the flight example, one time I could say that your stipulation is that you can only fly when naked, another time I could say no more than 3″ off the ground, another time it might be only in rooms with 8′ ceilings. The joke changes every time versus some of the other games where you might see the same joke or same style of joke played in multiple games.

Online: There are two ways this one works online, the first being that everyone reads out their own answer, that’s just fine because people will just pick their favorite. If you’re worried that person X might only pick person Y’s answer or not pick person Y’s answer, you can have all the answers privately messaged in a chat window to that rounds reader as well.

Hues and Cues

This is a new one for me, but one that I had success with last game night. In Cues and Hues you have a board that is basically just a massive color palette with an insanely large number of colors. The person who is it is trying to get people to guess what color they have based off of a card. The it person picks one of the colors and gives a one word clue, everyone else then places based off of where they think that color is. Then the it person can give a two word clue and everyone guesses again. Then it’s scored, if someone gets it right on, they get 3 points. if they are in on of the surrounding spaces directly around it, they get two, and the ring further out they get one. The person who was it gets one point for each person on the spot and in the inner ring. It goes around and that continues until someone reaches the end. This game is more challenging than you’d think, mainly because there are so many colors on there and the variations in the gradients of the color. That said, a lot of fun, and has that feeling when someone takes your spot of “nooooo” but also that you might have figured out the clue better sometimes. A lot of fun and easy to play.

Online: This one works pretty well, now, only the people with the game have the card with 4 colors, but everyone else can just pick a color on their turn. I will say that everyone should be playing off of a monitor so that colors are as consistent as possible, so that’s an issue. Also, this game is by nature very not colorblind friendly.

Just One

This one was a big hit last year as it’s a cooperative party game where you are all working together to try and get the guesser to guess the one word that they have picked. The guesser picks a number between one and five without seeing the corresponding word on the card. Then everyone else writes down a one word clue for it. So, for example, if the word was Karate someone could write down the clue “Kid” or “Martial” or “Discipline”. However, if two people wrote down the word “Kid” those two clues are cancelled out. The guesser than looks at the remaining clues and tries to guess the word. This one works well because you want to be clever with your clue, but not so clever that you lead someone down the wrong path. But, the more you know the people at the table, the more you can tailor a reference or a clue to the person. I really like this one for the cooperative nature as it means that no one who is too competitive will ruin the fun, or be as likely to, because you’re all in it together.

Online: This one needs a little, but just a little bit of work to make it work. The guesser needs to say a number and then stop looking at the screen so that they don’t see the corresponding word. Then they can’t look until people have compared their words. Once you get into the rhythm of it, it’s easy, but you just have to know who should and shouldn’t be looking when.

Cross Clues

This one is a new one for me this year. After seeing the Dice Tower play it, I knew it was going to be one that would hit the table a lot for me. In Cross Clues, you have an easy 3×3 grid to a hard 5×5 grid of words out, with columns of A-E for hard and rows of 1-5 for hard. Everyone has a card in their hand, and it has coordinates on it, for example it might be E5. Now, the person who has that card needs to get the other players to guess their coordinates so that they can progress in the game. To do that, you give a one word clue. So let’s say that the word for E was “Witch” and the word for 5 was “Stick”, you might go with a clue like broom. Broom handles are wood, and witches ride on brooms. Easy enough, but maybe instead it was “Witch” and “Broom” as well as the word on 4 is “Spoon”, what clue do you give, one word, that would get people to guess E5? You can’t go with wood or stick because of wooden spoons might get confused with your answer. But you could maybe go with fly, as long as that doesn’t sound like another answer. It’s a fun and thinky game where you get a lot of really cool and clever answers.

Online: This one works, but only kind of online. The people who aren’t there with the game can’t really give clues, because it’d be tricky to show them a coordinate card one at a time. Instead, it has worked well for my wife and myself to be the clue givers (and we can guess on the others clue) and everyone online to be a guesser. It’s less ideal, but it works.

Codenames Pictures

Now, for some people regular Codenames will do as well, I just prefer the pictures one for a few reasons that I’ve talked about before. I feel like it’s more dynamic because it isn’t language dependent. And I feel like there are way more opportunities to be clever with it. In this game there are two different teams trying to get a spy to all of their spots before the other team gets all their spies out onto the board, all while trying to avoid the one “you lose” spot. So the clue giver has to figure out how to connect abstract and absurd pictures, like dog jumping through a doughnut or a flower that is growing out of a diamond, things like that, so that their team can get as many of them as quickly as possible. And again, a one world clue. Codenames Pictures, because of the oddity of the pictures, gives you more of a chance to give interesting clues. This one can be a bit slow at times as people puzzle out what they think the clue means, but pictures is a lot more fun because you can get to guesses faster.

Online: If you have two people in the same location, it works well enough, those people are it and handle the clue giving. I know that people have found ways to make it work for the clue givers not to be in the same location, generally it involves setting up another camera and sharing that with just the players who are clue givers and is a bit more work.

Now, there are a lot more games a well that can be great. And maybe your family likes playing Apples to Apples once a year over Thanksgiving or Christmas and New Years Holidays. But if you are looking for something new, I think that all of these games offer some really interesting things, and as you can see most of them can work well online as well. I would say out of all of them, Hues and Cues and Codenames: Pictures are probably the hardest to do digitally.

What newer party games have you found that work well with your families and friends whom you get together with around the holidays?

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