Party Games 6 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Magic Maze

After being stripped of all their possessions, a mage, a warrior, an elf, and a dwarf are forced to go rob the local Magic Maze shopping mall for all the equipment necessary for their next adventure. They agree to map out the labyrinth in its entirety first, then find each individual’s favorite store, and then locate the exit. In order to evade the surveillance of the guards who eyed their arrival suspiciously, all four will pull off their heists simultaneously, then dash to the exit. That’s the plan anyway…but can they pull it off?

Magic Maze is a real-time, cooperative game. Each player can control any hero in order to make that hero perform a very specific action, to which the other players do not have access: Move north, explore a new area, ride an escalator… All this requires rigorous cooperation between the players in order to succeed at moving the heroes prudently. However, you are allowed to communicate only for short periods during the game; the rest of the time, you must play without giving any visual or audio cues to each other. If all of the heroes succeed in leaving the shopping mall in the limited time allotted for the game, each having stolen a very specific item, then everyone wins together.

At the start of the game, you have only three minutes in which to take actions. Hourglass spaces you encounter along the way give you more time. If the sand timer ever completely runs out, all players lose the game: Your loitering has aroused suspicion, and the mall security guards nab you!

While the driver gets all the attention, the pit crew are the unsung heroes of racing…

Pit Crew is a lightning-fast game where up to three teams of players must work together to get their race car back onto the track as quickly as possible. There are no turns in Pit Crew, as cards can be played at any time, but teams need to work together to make sure that their tires are properly replaced, fuel tank filled up, and engine repaired without making any costly mistakes. And will your team just go as fast as they can to get back out on the track? Or will you play smart and earn the Turbo Bonuses that can mean the difference between the checkered flag and last place?

Pit Crew challenges players to balance speed and skill in a fast-paced game of teamwork and communication.

In Secrets, the second co-design between Eric Lang and Bruno Faidutti, players are assigned a hidden team — the CIA or KGB — and are trying to collect the most points for their side. In addition, one or two players are secretly anti-establishment Hippies who are working for nobody. Their goal is to fight the Man and have the fewest points.

On your turn, offer one of two randomly drawn agent cards to another player. These cards are worth points and have varying good or bad abilities. That player either accepts the agent, in which case they score it, or they refuse, in which case the card returns to you, and you score it. The game ends when a player has five cards, after which the teams are revealed; the team with the highest combined score wins, unless a Hippie has the single lowest score, in which case they win.

The interactions between the character cards are the spice of the game, but since the abilities are discoverable during play, the game can be taught in three minutes.

Diamant is a quick, fun game of push-your-luck. Players venture down mine shafts by turning up cards from a deck, sharing the gems they find on the way down. Before the next card is turned up, you have the chance to leave the mine and stash your finds, including any gems you get on the way out. Why would you leave? Because the deck also contains hazards: scorpions, snakes, poison gases, explosions and rockfalls. When a duplicate hazard turns up (such as a second scorpion), anyone left in the shaft has to flee for safety and loses all the gems they got this turn. The trick is, the more players that leave, the bigger your share in the next card will be.

50 black stories, 31 crimes, 49 corpses, 11 murders, 12 suicides and one deadly meal. How could that have happened? Black Stories are fiddly, morbid and mysterious riddles for teenagers and adults. The players try to reconstruct the crime by asking, guessing and fiddling about. A spooky card game just right for any party.

A social game of deduction and deception. Who among you can see through the lies? Who is capable of getting away with murder?

In Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, players find themselves in a scenario of intrigue and murder, deduction and deception. One player is the Murderer, secretly choosing their weapon and the evidence they leave behind. Another is the Forensic Scientist who holds the key to convicting the criminal but is only able to express their knowledge through analysis of the scene. The rest are investigators, interpreting the clues to solve the crime – and the killer is among them. Investigators must collaborate and use their wits, their hunches, and their keen deductive insight to correctly identify the means of murder and the key evidence to convict the killer. The murderer must mislead and confuse the investigators to save themselves.

Do you have what it takes to see through the lies and catch the criminal in your ranks or will they muddy the waters long enough to get away with murder?

Spyfall is a party game unlike any other, one in which you get to be a spy and try to understand what’s going on around you. It’s really simple!

Spyfall is played over several rounds, and at the start of each round all players receive cards showing the same location — except that one player receives a card that says “Spy” instead of the location. Players then start asking each other questions — “Why are you dressed so strangely?” or “When was the last time we got a payday?” or anything else you can come up with — trying to guess who among them is the spy. The spy doesn’t know where he is, so he has to listen carefully. When it’s his time to answer, he’d better create a good story!

At any time during a round, one player may accuse another of being a spy. If all other players agree with the accusation, the round ends and the accused player has to reveal his identity. If the spy is uncovered, all other players score points. However, the spy can himself end a round by announcing that he understands what the secret location is; if his guess is correct, only the spy scores points.

After a few rounds of guessing, suspicion and bluffing, the game ends and whoever has scored the most points is victorious!

Spyfall 2 features the same gameplay as Spyfall with two important changes: (1) Enough location cards are included that the upper player count is now twelve instead of eight, and (2) two spies can be found at each location, giving all of the non-spy players more of a challenge when it comes to tracking down who doesn’t belong.

In this game, you turn into one of the influential citizens of a small but very wealthy town. Gathered together with others authoritative persons like yourself in some hidden place, you share money earned from another shady business. You need to use all your diplomatic tricks to make deals to determine how much money everyone collects. Can you be silver-tongued enough to please everyone, including yourself? You should because the player with the most money wins the game!

Gentleman’s Deal is a diplomatic party game about sharing money. Each turn, one player becomes a dealer and receives a secret card with the amount of money they must share. They make offers personally to each player, then those players simultaneously vote “yes” or “no”. If a deal was accepted by a majority of players, they gain all offered by dealer and the dealer takes the rest! The dealer must balance between being too generous and too greedy because if a majority of players vote to decline their offer, the dealer heads to jail and must skip their next turn.

Acquiring money isn’t the only goal of the deals. Players also share useful contacts represented by the cards of different accomplices that give powerful benefits, and everybody wants to obtain them.

The game ends after several rounds depending on the number of players, and whoever has most money wins!

Every division of booty is a tense situation. Will you be the Mastermind, the Driver, or the Snitch?

Millions of Dollars is a hidden role game with no elimination and non-random distribution of roles in which you negotiate and talk your way into as much loot as possible. Choose your role well and disguise your duplicity until the moment that you can play your cards just right…

Sushi Go Party!, an expanded version of the best-selling card game Sushi Go!, is a party platter of mega maki, super sashimi, and endless edamame. You still earn points by picking winning sushi combos, but now you can customize each game by choosing à la carte from a menu of more than twenty delectable dishes. What’s more, up to eight players can join in on the sushi-feast. Let the good times roll!

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