Base price: $11.
3 – 8 players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of That’s Not A Hat was provided by Ravensburger.
Hats. You love them, I love them, some dudes on the internet don’t quite understand them. They’ve been around forever, from the party hat to the grandpa’s-going-golfing hat to the now-deeply alarming bright red forwards baseball cap. Truly, there has never been a game that’s challenged us with whether or not something might be a hat, until now.
In That’s Not A Hat, players are gift-givers, passing gifts around and doing their best to remember what a gift is. If someone tries to pass you something that isn’t what they say it is, you have to call them out! Everyone needs to know they’re claiming this telephone is a hat. That’s embarrassing and they deserve to be shamed. But be careful! If your memory doesn’t hold up, the shamer might end up becoming the shamed! Do you have what it takes to remember four to nine cards at once?
Contents
Setup
Basically none. Shuffle the gifts and deal each player one, face-up:
You’re ready to go!
Gameplay
That’s Not A Hat challenges players with the simple art of gift-giving. When it’s your turn, you’ll draw a face-up gift from the top of the deck and show it to everyone. Then, you’ll turn it face-down. You’ve now got two gifts, which is too many for any one person, so you’ll give your older gift away to the player indicated on the back of the card. Note that if this is the first round, you’ll need to flip your face-up gift face-down. You’ll tell them what it is, and they can then accept or refuse.
If a player refuses, they must say “That’s not a {whatever you said}.” and flip the card over. If they’re right, you take the card and place it aside in your penalty area. If they’re wrong, they take the card. Either way, the player who took the penalty point takes a new gift from the top of the deck and starts the process anew.
If the player accepts the gift, they simply say “Thank you.” (that’s polite) and then place the gift in front of them. Again, however, they now have two gifts, so they must pass the older gift to the player indicated on the arrow, and it’s their turn to accept or refuse.
Play continues until any one player has three penalty points. The game then ends, and the player with the fewest penalty points wins!
To make the game more challenging, you can split the deck into white-backed cards and black-backed cards, and then only play with one deck or the other (so players can’t use the card color as a memory aid). To add even more challenge, try playing with two starting gifts for each player. New gifts are placed at the top of the column, and the card at the bottom of the column always gets passed. Good luck!
Player Count Differences
This is a pretty tough memory game, as it’s essentially the classic shell game but with multiple objects that you need to remember at once. Half the fun comes from just straight-up forgetting and trying to lie your way through it. While that might fly pretty well at three, at eight, unless you’ve got a steel trap of a memory, you’ve got no hope of getting through it on pure skill alone. It’s a bit too hectic for me, as a result, though I’ve had quite a bit of fun with smaller groups.
Strategy
- Do whatever you can to remember cards. It’s a shell game! You want to keep track of what the various gifts are, yes, but you need to remember where the gifts are, as several of them are going to come back to you over the course of the game! It’s … best if you remember what they all are, but, honestly, at higher player counts that’s significantly easier said than done.
- You can try lying, but you’re just as likely to confuse yourself. If you’re not keeping track of your lies, you’re just literally adding more noise to the entire system. When I first tried that I ended up forgetting where the various cards were and that caused a whole set of problems. Mostly for me, because I forgot everything in an attempt to remember what I was lying about. So, who knows. You can try it and see where it gets you.
- If you’re not sure, bluff. Just kind of guess what your options might be! It’s probably better if you know so that you don’t get called on your bluff, but, hey, who knows. Knowing what gifts you have in play can be more helpful than not.
- Keep in mind that once bluffing starts, though, the game has enough entropy added to it that all of your information might be bad. At a certain point someone’s going to invent an entirely new gift and everyone might legitimately believe it, and that’s going to cause even more problems. So that’s exciting!
- Feel free to switch from a bluff to a double-bluff to a triple-bluff as needed. What even is truth? Maybe you pretend you don’t know what the card you’re passing is, just because you’re trying to throw them off, but you actually do know what the card is. Or you just convince your opponents that that’s the case. Again, who even knows. That’s the beauty of bluffing games; you can kind of just say anything you want.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- It’s just a really good name for a game. It’s a good name for a game, it’s a good exclamation, and just a good thing to keep in mind. Who among us has not confused something that is clearly not a hat for a hat, only to be informed of our folly? It really makes you think.
- The bright pink box is also nice. Too many board games lack the confidence to go with obnoxious colors for the box, and I miss that. We need a neon renaissance in board game boxes, and I think games like That’s Not A Hat will eventually get us there.
- I like the simple card and art style, too; it makes the game memorable in its own way. It’s just a generally good vibe, in terms of overall aesthetic. I like the clean, simple art on all the cards.
- I always like a game that takes a player-elimination-esque mechanic and just ends the game, instead. There’s definitely a version of this game where you play until there’s one person left and as soon as you’re wrong three times, you’re out, but I’m glad they didn’t go that direction for the design. It’s nice for a game to just be quick, sometimes.
- Normally not the biggest fan of memory games, but also normally I’m decent at memory games; neither is true, here. It’s wild how just trying to keep track of what a few moving cards are can completely melt your brain, but, there you have it. I think it’s pretty funny, all things considered. I usually remember things in games pretty well, but one little hiccup of movement and suddenly I’m completely lost.
Mehs
- There’s just barely too many cards to easily shuffle the entire deck at once. It’s a surprisingly large deck of cards! There’s not always much you can do about that.
Cons
- The game can be a little bit slow until you start getting arrows pointing in different directions. If you all end up with gifts pointing clockwise or counter-clockwise, the game can be a little uninteresting at first. What you need is a mess of arrows pointing in each direction so you pass and then it’s passed back to you and then you just get hit from both sides for a little bit. It keeps things nice and hectic for every player.
Overall: 7.5 / 10
Overall, That’s Not A Hat is a cute and quick little party game! I tend to keep it handy for get-to-know-you events and small get-togethers, because it’s easy to teach and quick to play, and it’s always nice to see one person just come fully into their power and start bluffing like they’ve never told the truth a single day of their life. It’s a triumph. Yes, granted, the game gets a lot harder to track at higher player counts, but that’s sometimes kind of the fun! You can just start bluffing and hoping that nobody’s able to keep their eye on the shells as well as you can, and you can often get away with it! Just, you know, forgetting is half the fun too. It’s a cute game and I’m interested to see what’s coming next for it, especially with another set slated to come out this year (with special cards, of some kind?). Either way, if you’re looking for a short and simple party game, you enjoy a bit of bluffing, or you just want to yell “That’s not a hat!”, you might enjoy That’s Not A Hat! I think it’s quite fun.
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