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As mediums and paranormal investigators, it’s your job to uncover a decades-old murder mystery in a haunted house.
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DecryptoĬommuning with the dead may not be the first choice of activity when hosting a bangin’ party, but Mysterium proves that it’s one of the best ways to keep guests entertained. Fair warning if you choose to pick this one up: friendships may be destroyed. There are also several different flavors available, from vampires to aliens, if werewolves aren’t your cup of tea. If you want a good idea of what One Night Ultimate Werewolf has to offer, check out this video of a sample game. Each game is a chaotic flurry of accusations that will have the table in lively conversation during and after the game. Because there’s no 100 percent way to know who is telling the truth, the game depends on your ability to read your friends’ tells. Each role has a special ability that help offer clues, such as the seer who can look at some of the roles, or the troublemaker who can switch roles with someone else. At the start of the game, each player is dealt a secret role, and it’s the goal of group to weed out who the werewolves are, unless of course you are a werewolf yourself. It’s simple to learn, encourages a lot of player interaction, and plays in about 10 minutes. The One Night franchise has become nearly synonymous with the term “party game,” and for good reason. Dixit boasts surreal and beautiful artwork that makes the game a joy to experience and discuss, and the reliance on creativity will bring out the storyteller in even your most stubborn friends. The rub is they get no points if nobody or everybody guesses their card, so it’s important to find a balance between vague and descriptive when describing the card. The cards are shuffled and then revealed, and everyone attempts to choose which card was the storyteller’s, who gets points if people correctly guess their card. Then the other players choose a card from their own hand that they feel best fits the description the storyteller gave. The concept is simple: each turn one player is the storyteller, and uses a simple word or phrase to describe one of the cards in their hand. Despite all the new content in recent years, 2011’s Dixit Odyssey remains the best version of the game. Since then, its unique approach to storytelling in games has been expanded on and reiterated nearly a dozen times. In 2010, the original Dixit won the Spiel des Jahres, Germany’s coveted game of the year award. Because of Bang! The Dice Game’s easy ruleset and quick playtime, it’s a great game to play while waiting for the rest of the party to show up. There are different victory conditions depending on your role: the sheriff wins if all the outlaws are defeated, the outlaws win if the sheriff is defeated, and so on. A turn consists of a player rolling five dice Yhatzee-style, then applying the effects to the table, but because nobody is sure of the others’ role, figuring out who to deal damage to and who to heal takes on the form of a logic puzzle. Everyone is also dealt a random character card that gives them a unique power. Players are dealt secret roles, with the sheriff revealing themself at the start of the game. The dice game version fixes this in a big way, and is now the best version of Bang! you can play. The original Bang! was long considered a party game go-to, but one of the major complaints was its length-it was too long for what it was. But if you happen to find the right collection of friends, Spyfall can offer hours of hilarity and memorable moments. Spyfall is designed to be nonlinear and rely on the ability of the players to keep the game going, so it may not be a good fit for every group. It’s almost like watching James Bond forget he’s a spy and talk about how good he is at basketball instead. This leads to some great conversations that sees the spy struggling to keep up.
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Heavily improvisational, Spyfall requires you to walk a fine line between giving out too much information about your secret role and acting suspicious by not giving out enough. It’s up to the players to converse in order to weed out the spy.
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For instance, if the location deck is the school, one player might be a teacher, one might be a student, and another the spy. Within each location are specific roles, as well as one spy. The game consists of several decks of cards, each revolving around a different location. Another spy-themed game, Spyfall places players in secret roles as they try to figure out who among them drew the spy card.
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