Base price: $25.
2 – 10 players.
Play time: 15 – 20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 3 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Thing Thing was provided by DVC Games.

I haven’t actually seen any of the Venom movies. It’s unexpected, I know; I just have the vibe of loving to watch terrible comic book movies for kicks. And it’s true; I do that! So my buddy came over and we watched two of the three tonight while I tried to work on my reviews, and given how aggressively behind I am on writing, you can guess for yourself how well that went! Turns out I can’t write and watch a new movie at the same time, but now I understand why people like the Venom movies. They’re stupid, and extremely fun. Great popcorn flicks. You love to see it. Anyways, that has almost nothing to do with the game I’m writing about today, Thing Thing. That’s a segue, folks; let’s get to it.

In Thing Thing, players are trying to categorize everything at once. You’ve got a bunch of cards in your hand; what’s one category that can hold a bunch of them? Problem is, every time you come up with a category to get rid of cards, you have to draw more if any of your opponents play a card that belongs to your category! It’s deeply unfair. Will you be able to shed your cards first?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

None, really. First, remove the blank cards and set them aside. Then, shuffle the remaining cards and deal each player seven.

Give one player the Last Place star, and play starts with the player to their left!

Gameplay

This one’s simple. Each turn, you choose a category and play any number of cards from your hand that would belong in that category. Categories can be things like “risky Instagram hashtags”, “things that float in water”, or, depending on your cards, “things the Vice President likely can’t be trusted with”. That part’s easy.

Where it gets challenging is that other players can contribute their cards to your category, too. Every one they successfully contribute forces you to draw a card to replace it. So “things found in a tree” might not be a good category! There are a few rules:

• No “meta” categories. “Cards in my hand” is the given example. Don’t be a jerk.
• No categories using words on the card. If your card says “Bowling Pin”, you can’t use the category “Things found in a bowling alley”. Get creative.
• You can make a category about rhymes or syllables or spelling once per player per game. Whether or not you want to risk “things that start with a b” is up to you.

If you don’t like a player’s pick, any player can challenge. However, it only takes one other player to overrule the challenge, so good luck! Play then moves on to the next player.

The first player to empty their hand of cards goes out! They get to choose a blank card and add their own thing for subsequent games. All other players go out when they go out. The last player to go out loses, and earns the Last Place Star for next game!

Player Count Differences

There are a few. With fewer players, you’re going to have less risk associated with any particular category since fewer players mean fewer cards and fewer people trying to throw in on your category. However, with more players, you can play more cards between your turns (since there are more players coming up with categories), so you have less risk because you should need fewer of your turns in order to go out. Personally, I think these things functionally cancel out, so the difference is more gameplay than overall quality of experience. With more players, you do have more people chiming in for silly debates about what would qualify, though, and I think that’s generally a good thing. But I’ve tried this with two and that’s been fun, too. No major preference overall.

Strategy

• Nitpick aggressively at your own risk. If you do, you’ll find that a lot of players won’t back you up if you get challenged. You never want to be the least popular player at the table when negotiations matter.
• Make your categories specific. The broader the category, the more cards that can be played to it. While that might empty your hand, you don’t want to help your opponents. If you do, you might end up drawing more cards than you played.
• Feel free to argue your case when you play a card. It’s the only way to get other players to support you if you get challenged, I feel.
• Try to avoid having a turn with only one card in hand. You end up having to pass your turn and draw a card, which sucks.
• You’re unlikely to win on your turn. Just because other players may play cards and force you to draw. Instead, look for ways you can go out on someone else’s category, if you’re lucky. Can’t draw cards there.
• You’re not playing to win; you’re playing to not lose. You don’t need to aggressively challenge players who are close to going out; you just need to make sure you don’t end up taking on so many cards that you can’t go out before someone else.
• Don’t forget that you can leverage the spelling or construction of a word as a category once per game. It’s relatively useful, but that tends to be a broad category if you’re not thinking too deeply about it, which might stick you with more cards. Sometimes it’s better to just pass.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• This inspires plenty of silly debates. Not annoying ones like if a hot dog is a sandwich, interesting ones like how long it takes a human to fully decompose (10 – 15 years, apparently) or how much of the Nile River you could drink until you got sick.
• Very portable game. I love these small box games with the magnetic lids; they’re great.
• Word games or category games make for great party games. I think they appeal to a wide range of players and player types, and that generally ends up being good for party games. It’s why Medium and Stay Cool and so many others end up going over so well.
• Each turn plays quickly. You’re just coming up with a category or trying to contribute to someone else’s.
• I particularly appreciate that there’s something for players to do that keeps them engaged when it’s not their turn. I also like that once you get challenged and lose, you can’t keep submitting. It keeps the actual arguing to a minimum.
• I like the retro vibes of the whole game. It’s a nice color scheme and it looks great. Reminds me of Game Changer a bit, actually.
• I also really like that the first person out gets to add a new card. I added Kirby in my first game; I have yet to see how that’s going to work out.
• The “Last Place” star is silly. It’s just a nice thing to be proud of whoever loses, and it helps soften the blow, I think.

Mehs

• The cards are a weird shape to shuffle in bulk, but them’s the breaks sometimes. They’re very long and very thin, which can be a bit of an odd riffle shuffle. Yes, I have preferences on card shapes and types for riffle shuffling; I’m a unique and multifaceted individual.

Cons

• You go through a lot of cards per game and they’re pretty memorable, so the game seems a bit repetitive after a few plays (though it’s not!). It’s mostly that you feel like you’ve seen a bunch of the cards after a few plays since you go through the deck so quickly. More cards would mitigate this problem but not fix it. I wouldn’t say the game is repetitive; you’ll just feel like you’ve seen everything pretty quickly.

Overall: 9 / 10

Overall, I love Thing Thing. It’s exactly my kind of party game. There’s something deeply pathological about our need to define everything into rigid taxonomies, and rather than argue about that, Thing Thing challenges us to come up with nonsensical taxonomies to hold a group of random things. Need “good nicknames for a dog”? Thing Thing’s got you. Need “unacceptable names for a baby”? That’s even easier. What ends up happening each round is one player tries to slide in a word that has no business being in that category, and then they have the challenge of needing to make their case to at least one sympathetic player. It’s, as promised, goofy. And I love that. We’re going to mess with the format a bit next time we play because I want to see if we can make submitting pairs work, but the game’s rules are fun and flexible. I definitely wish there were more cards, but their choice of cards is already fun. Double meanings abound, hidden combinations are everywhere, and there’s just some genuinely silly stuff. I even like that it can play well with two or with eight! It’s a very flexible game and very portable, so I’m sure it’ll end up going places with me. In the meantime, if you’re a fan of party games, you love a word game, or you’re just looking for something to fit into the category of “an easy way to have a good time”, I’d definitely recommend Thing Thing! It’s a hoot.

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