Base price: $30.
3 – 6 players.
Play time: 30 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of The Same Game was provided by Hachette Boardgames.
Still watching the Oscars. I think I enjoy an awards show, end-to-end, but I’m a sucker for “the thing I like should have won” or “the thing I like did win, thereby validating my preferences”. Both are silly emotions to bring to an awards show, but that’s the fun. We still have these arguments sometimes within The American Tabletop Awards, too, but, you know, it’s ongoing. We usually just wait for someone online to yell at us that we picked the wrong one instead, but thankfully that’s been toning down over the last few years. Some folks were angry in year one. More on that another time. In the interim, let’s talk about The Same Game.
In The Same Game, your task is a little different. Each round, you’ll get a word and a number. That number refers to a category that you have to get your co-players to figure out: your Trap Category. The challenge is that you have to pick a word that connects to the word you’re dealt via the Trap Category. Easy enough until you remember that there are a bunch of other categories you have to disambiguate. Can you figure out how to connect a word to “refrigerator” that clues “length” but not “weight” or “volume”? What if “frequency worldwide” is thrown into the mix? It gets trickier than you expect. So rather than trying to guess the Trap Category straight up, you should try to eliminate the categories that are obviously wrong. Maybe “price”. The more you correctly eliminate, the more points you score as a group. But guess wrong and your score locks in. So work as a team to get as many points as you can!
Contents
Player Count Differences
I wouldn’t say there are too many differences, here; with more players you get fewer individual turns, but I’d say the guessing and the discussion are part of the fun anyways, so it mostly evens itself out. At 5+ you may worry a bit about the conversation getting too jumbled and hectic, but if that’s the case, just make sure everyone gets a chance to talk. It’s a game. With fewer players, you may find that you wish you had additional voices to help disambiguate or split up different opinions and such. You’re not necessarily going to see a huge bunch of other differences. It’s a talking game. It’s a party game. It does both of those things quite well no matter how many people you have.
Strategy
- Don’t start picking categories right away. You need to take a quick breath and process the information you’ve been given. One of the biggest mistakes folks make (folks is me) is immediately picking a category that seems like an obvious mismatch without thinking about the other ones first. If you pause for a second you lower your risk of jumping the gun (and being wrong).
- Immediately order the categories on confidence. You should know which categories you’re most confident are not the Trap Category. Once you’ve got that, start picking.
- Keep in mind the order in which information is given. You’re given the category and the word first, and then you come up with a word that’s connected to the word you drew given the category. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the connection is going to make perfect sense; the clue-giver is trying to come up with a word that meets that category and avoids other ones. It’s tough.
- Sometimes it’s just going to be too close. There are a lot of categories; sometimes you can’t distinguish well enough. If you can’t get it beyond two, well, just guess; you already get plenty of points.
- Try to be straightforward and intuitive, if you can. This game is fully cooperative; you don’t get any bonus points for tricking your co-players or making a particularly challenging move or play. Don’t not have fun with it, but do try to consider what will make your fellow players’ lives easier.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Look, everyone loves a category word game. I think it’s just generally been a crowd-pleaser across the board with my friend group, and this one’s no exception. A lot of what I like about this genre is the consistent (sometimes gently heated) discussion that happens between rounds where players are arguing taxonomical groupings of arbitrary things or just saying “violence isn’t a superpower” (though that’s a different game). It’s all very silly.
- I like that you can score progressively more points, so it’s not just “getting it right”, it’s a gradual process. A lot of games are “you either have it or you don’t” and that binary can be a bit defeatist for some players. Here, there’s almost always something you can eliminate to make progress, and that lets players feel a lot more in control of their ultimate outcome. It improves the feeling of player agency, and that’s never a bad thing.
- The adjustable difficulty levels are great. I always like a game you can make easier or more difficult, and I appreciate that they really figured out how to make “difficult” categories not just on their own, but by having them exist along an axis that intersects a bunch of other categories in a way that’s particularly hard to disambiguate. It’s good, solid design work.
- I also like that it feels relatively easy to expand on. You could add more words or more categories with (relatively) low effort and still end up in a pretty good spot. Adding an entirely new difficulty level would be trickier, I think.
- The way players bring information in and have to tie words together is pretty fun. This is another lateral move away from “name an example of a category”, as you’re given a word and a category and you have to come up with not only another word that’s similar to the first word via that category but a word that fits that bill for your assigned category and, ideally, nothing else. It’s not necessarily how we’re geared to think about this and it leads to funny outcomes.
- The little cups are stupid and somehow perfect for the game. I love dumb little cups! They’re fun and they add a bit of whimsy to the game. Plus, they’re perfect for covering up the number tokens, so it all works out. A great bit of product design added to the experience.
Mehs
- It’s not necessarily a bad idea to discuss what everyone believes the categories mean when you place them; they’re vague on purpose. There are definitely a few (we had this trouble with volume as “an assessment of the size of a bounding box around this object” vs. “the explicit volume of the object itself”, but I imagine price or duration of use could also pop up sometimes), so it may help you to clarify the ideas of the categories.
Cons
- The luck of the draw can really mess you up with certain categories. It’s just the way things shake out if you get certain pairs for certain words, and that can likely cost you some points. On one hand, that’s never the funnest, but on the other hand, it’s a cooperative party game; who cares?
Overall: 8.25 / 10
Overall, I think The Same Game is great! Not surprising, given Warsch is on a bit of a tear in the party game space at the moment, but I appreciate getting to try new things and see where they land for me. I think the key part of a good party game is either making players laugh or making players discuss, and The Same Game can often do both! Occasionally to its own detriment, if player discussion gets too heated, but the role of the person who brought the game is also to make sure that doesn’t happen, to some degree. Everything else about The Same Game is geared towards being whimsical and engaging. It’s got a bright and fun color scheme, silly little cups, and a lot of content to present players with; all great things. I’m vaguely surprised there hasn’t been a content expansion pack already, given that it’s a solid game that supporting with additional content would likely amount to cards and tiles. Granted, I’m not on the manufacturing or product sides, so it’s difficult for me to actually say more that isn’t just me talking out my ass. I’d like to see more, at least. In the meantime, I do like how the categories encourage you to think about things a different way. Is the sun more like a fish in terms of appearance or in terms of duration of use? Probably neither, but if those are your only two options left, you bet there will be a discussion (of the two, it’s probably appearance?). I like games that present players with a challenge that can’t necessarily be proven or solved; it just has to be discussed and reasoned. It helps players understand each other (and their own preexisting contextual biases, sometimes) a lot better. The Same Game does all that and is still fun, so, great marks from me. If you’re looking for a great party game, you enjoy comparisons and categories, or you just want to come up with something diabolical, The Same Game will likely be right up your alley!
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