Base price: $25.
4 – 8 players.
Play time: 10 – 15 minutes.
BGG | Board Game Atlas
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 1; game consists of multiple rounds of similar gameplay.
Full disclosure: A review copy of Glitch Squad was provided by Resonym.
As promised, a handful of party games and solo games coming down the pipeline in the next few weeks. And maybe, potentially, some older games that I’ve been meaning to get to? We will see. I have the next five weekends booked pretty solid, so it’s honestly anyone’s guess. I should be able to get some writing done … next Friday. Or maybe while I’m at GAMA, if I have some downtime. I never know how much writing I can get done at a conference. It’s either a ton or none. Lately, it’s been none. But in the meantime, let’s talk about a game I’ve been excited to tell y’all about for a while: Glitch Squad, from our friends at Resonym!
In Glitch Squad, players work as forensic scientists, trying as hard as possible to solve crimes in teams by figuring out evidence and all that. The problem is, Glitch, the lovable office cat, keeps walking on the keyboard while you’re trying to work and scrambling up your clues! You’d be furious if you were capable of anything other than loving Glitch with all your heart, so, there’s that. You will just have to do your best work while Glitch continues to mess around with your computer. There’s really no other solution. Will you be able to solve the crimes? Or will Glitch get the better of you?
Contents
Setup
Setup takes a bit. Generally, you’ll want to play this with even player counts; if you’re playing with an odd number of players, check my Player Count Differences section for how that changes gameplay. Each player should be assigned to the blue or yellow team, and then player should sit so that the player to their left and right is on the opposite team (sitting alternating blue / yellow / blue, et cetera). Each player will then get a marker and a Clue Board in their color:
Shuffle the Forensics cards, next:
And then shuffle the four Evidence decks, keeping them in order: Location, Profession, Hobby, Weapon.
Finally, the slightly-more complex thing. Take a sleeve of the opposite team’s color:
Grab a Password Card. You can look at it, but don’t show it to anyone else:
Slide the Password Card into the sleeve so that the numbers are poking out and then pass the sleeved card face-down to the player on your left. Nobody should look at the card they’re receiving.
Finally, pick a random number between 1 and 6! That will be the players’ number for all Evidence Cards and the number of the Password they’re trying to crack. You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
Glitch Squad is a team-based game where you, forensic investigators, try to uncover your secret passwords by solving for evidence based on clues you get from your partners! Unfortunately, Glitch, the adorable office cat, occasionally walks on your keyboards and messes up some of the clues you get! You’ll have to be pretty quick on your feet to figure out what’s been changed and why! Or, you know, you can always focus on messing up your opponents yourself…
The game is played over a series of rounds. Each round has three parts; let’s dive into them!
Write Clues
To start off, every player will draw an Evidence Card based on the round. As mentioned, you start with Location, then Profession, then Hobby, then Weapon, then back to Location, and so on, depending on how many rounds you’ve played.
Then, write the Evidence in the Evidence box inside of your Clue Board. You’ll write three clues about the Evidence, as well, following these rules:
- The clues must be one word.
- The clues cannot be proper nouns. I mess this one up frequently.
- The clues must be entirely different words than the Evidence. I take this to mean no shared roots or things like that.
- The clues must be entirely different words from each other.
- The third clue must start with the letter printed on your Clue Board. Have fun with that one.
After you’re finished, fold your Clue Board and place it on your left, glitched computer-side up.
Glitch Clues
Once everyone has finished writing clues, they pass them to the player on their left. Why are you passing your clues to your opponent? Because it’s time for Glitch to get involved. Each player looks inside the Clue Board they were passed and copies two of the three clues from the inside to the outside. The third clue they Glitch! This means they can write whatever they want as the third clue. You cannot change the other two clues, but you can swap the order of all three. Keep in mind if you Glitch the clue with the fixed letter, you do not have to start your Glitched clue with the same letter. Otherwise, your clues have to follow the same rules.
Guess Evidence
Now, each player takes turns trying to guess their Evidence! Starting with this round’s start player, each player will have a turn to guess theirs. Flip the timer for the first one, and then flip the Clue Board to the Glitched Side. Using those three words, shout what you think the Evidence is! You can go as fast as you want, and keep guessing until the timer runs out. Your teammate who wrote the clues should check your answers and let you know if you got it! Note that Evidence is always a one or two word phrase; parts of speech and word order don’t matter.
If you’re right, open the Clue Board to confirm and slide out the next letter in your Password.
If you’re wrong, your opponent who Glitched your clues slides out the next letter in their Password. You then follow the instructions on the Forensics Card and take one more guess. If you’re right, you also get to slide out the next letter in your Password. If you’re wrong, nothing bad happens; your turn just ends.
End of Round
Once everyone’s had a shot at guessing Evidence, players may take turns guessing their Password, if they want. If you’re guessing, your opponent gets to check the card. If you’re right, you flip it over, and for the rest of the game, when you would slide out a letter, you can designate one of your teammates to slide out a letter instead! If you’re wrong, you don’t get to use the Forensics Card next round.
After this, discard the Evidence Cards, flip over the next Forensics Card, pass the Glitch token to the left, and erase all the Clue Boards; you’re ready for the next round!
End of Game
Once any team has guessed all their Passwords, they win! If both teams guess all their Passwords in the same round, both teams win!
Player Count Differences
Quite a few! At three players, the blue player plays against two yellow players. At five, there’s a Private Investigator! They always glitch the first player’s clues and they get to write down a “Trap Evidence”, which is a word that they want the first player to guess instead of their chosen Evidence clue. The PI doesn’t write clues. If the first player says the Trap Evidence, that’s when the PI gets to advance their password (and they advance it again if the first player doesn’t guess their actual Evidence). Beyond that, though, there aren’t a ton of player count differences! You mostly engage with the players before and after you, and even at four players that just means that you engage with basically every player either through glitching their clues, them glitching yours, or them guessing your glitched clues. It just expands outwards as the player count increases and the circle expands. It’s nice like that. As a result, no player count preferences! I’d probably stick to even numbers so that there’s consistency across players, but that’s just my preference.
Strategy
- When giving clues, you need to think about how your clues can potentially be misinterpreted. If you try writing something for, say, HOSPITAL, and you write DOCTOR, SHOT, and SURGERY, you’re probably fine. Going to be hard to glitch any one of those clues and throw off your guesser. If you write WHEELS, VEHICLE, and DRIVER for BUS and your opponent glitches WHEELS to COMPETITION, you might have more trouble (as your opponent might start guessing RACE TRACK or something similar). Thinking about how to try and lock down your clues so that they lead to the Evidence in any combination is a generally good idea.
- When you get your three clues, look at the pairs and try to see if two of the pairs lead you to the same word. This is basically the same thing as above, but backwards (from the perspective of the guesser). What words do each pair of clues generate? You know one is unreliable, so try to see if you can get anything from the three pairs of words rather than relying on your impressions from all three of the words at once.
- Also, stream of consciousness! Try to get as many guesses in as you can in the limited time you have. Just start dumping guesses out there! There’s no real reason not to, after all. The more clues you can come up with, the better your chances are. Just make sure you enunciate, so that your partner can hear everything you’re saying. You don’t want to only end up making three or four guesses; the more you make, the more you can try and get close to what the answer is.
- If you’re glitching your opponent’s clues, try to steer the player after you in the wrong direction, if you can. Try to come up with a set of three clues that points at something entirely wrong. You’d ideally end up with something in a different category, using a homonym or something. If you steer them too close to the correct answer, they’ll just end up with it as soon as they find out their initial guess was wrong.
- Sometimes your word is just going to be extremely difficult; just do what you can. The words vary in difficulty pretty wildly (someone got windsurfing once; not sure how you clue that unless you know it well). If you can’t get it this round, no big deal.
- Trying to guess your password isn’t a bad idea, as long as you have a few letters. Just keep the consequences in mind. You’ll miss out on the Forensics Card, but that’s not always the biggest deal in the world? If you think you can get it (or at least have it down to two options), it’s usually worth just going for it. After all, you might not even need the Forensics Card.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- This is a super fun concept. I love how dynamic it is! Word association games are also one of my favorite things, so doing that and trying to figure out a word one letter at a time blends a lot of my favorite things about Anomia and Phantom Ink into one spot.
- I like how involved you are in your teammates’ play and your opponents’ play. Everyone gets to be involved in several stages of gameplay! You get to give clues, glitch clues, and guess clues! You’re constantly doing something, and the cycle of that is very pleasant. Even when I’m not guessing or glitching or clueing, I’m still listening to other players’ guesses and trying to see if I could have guessed it! Glitch Squad does a nice job of keeping all players invested even when they’re not as active in their participation.
- I also like that once you guess your password, you’re still in the game. You’re not eliminated, and can actually double the effectiveness of other players’ turns. It’s a nice way to make sure that winning doesn’t feel like a punishment of some kind.
- It’s actually great that both teams can win. I’m a cooperative gamer at heart, so finding ways for multiple players to win is always a goal of mine. I appreciate that there’s no tiebreaker and teams can just … win.
- The art is very fun! Glitch is adorable and they’re my new favorite. I really like the blue and yellow color scheme, as well.
- I like that you’re forced to give a clue with a certain letter, and I really like that you end up passing them around, so you’re not limited to the same letter every round. It’s a nice way to restrict players and give them some constraints, but I appreciate that the constraints rotate over the course of the game. It gives you something approximating flexibility.
Mehs
- 10 – 15 minutes is a bold claim for your first game, at least; expect it to take longer. I really respect whoever comes up with game times, but I think our first game took almost an hour.
- I do wonder a bit about the longevity of a card, if players start learning the text on other cards. I think it’s possible that you might get some of that over the course of multiple games, but I’m not sure it’s that big of a problem. Worst case, make up your own.
- I would have liked a bit more variety from the Forensic Cards. A chunk of the Forensic Cards are kind of the … same general effect? It’s a bit odd. It would have been nice for these cards to be a more unique experience than they currently are.
Cons
- There’s some variance in the complexity of various words, which may feel somewhat unfair in the moment as you play. This roughly amortizes out over the course of the game; you get “easy” and “hard” words, but players aren’t really going to notice the easy ones as much as the hard ones, which may cause some consternation at the table. Not much for that. Switchblade is a much “harder” word to guess than knife, for instance, but that’s largely due to how specific it is. Do your best, I suppose.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I really like Glitch Squad! I think I already knew I was in for a good one when I saw the cat on the cover, but Glitch Squad also takes a couple different elements of games that I like and combines them in a way that feels fluid and interesting! I love word association games (or really any game where you’re trying to guess a word), so adding that and real-time play is always a recipe for a good time for me. However, giving players the ability to subtly mess with other players’ clues elevates the game to a roiling good time. It’s really interesting how one word can completely throw off your thought process and direct you totally off base, for instance, and I like how Glitch Squad has a pretty good system for handling that, handling right and wrong answers, and for handling the overall outcome of the game. Sure, your password might be CHEST, but couldn’t it also be CHESTNUT? Again, hard to say. The core of the game is also impressively dynamic; you’re usually always doing something, and if you’re just watching, why not try to guess the word as well? Just … do that privately, so you don’t give anything away. I don’t love the variance on the Evidence Cards themselves, just because some are significantly more specific or challenging or complex than others, but I feel like over the course of shuffling and the game it mostly irons out to a perfectly fine amount. I’ve been trying to get back into party games as part of my “Let’s Try to Be More Fun” Initiative, and Glitch Squad has been a worthy addition to the pile. If you’re looking for a fun party game, you love word association and a bit of subterfuge, or you’re just a cat fan, I’d definitely recommend checking Glitch Squad out! I’ve had a blast playing it.
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