Base price: $25.
3 – 8 players.
Play time: ~25 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Bullseye was provided by 25th Century Games.
I don’t really know why, but I love watching other people play video games. I partially wonder if I just like being able to see people making different decisions than the ones I made? Or maybe I like the game enough that it’s just fun to revisit the setting without the pressure of having to do anything. Not sure. My friend is starting Pokemon Legends Z-A imminently, so I’m going to be writing while I watch that. Apologies in advance if any of the text here starts to get infected with random Legends snippets; I have a bad habit of adopting the speech style of anything I’m watching if I watch something while I write. Probably a language processing overlap or something; I’m not a brain scientist. In the meantime, let’s talk about Bullseye!
In Bullseye, you’re cooperatively working together to hit the mark on a word! You’ve got a category and an example, and you’re trying to clue one player to correctly guess it. The challenge is that every player only gets to give their clue one letter at a time, and then they have to pass it on to the next player! Can you give a useful hint to the guesser? And more difficult still, can you figure out what clue your co-player was trying to give them? It’s a ready-aim-fire sort of situation, I suppose.
Contents
Setup
Everyone gets an arrow!
You’ll also set up the target:
Shuffle up the cards and deal the start player two; they’ll use those instead of the arrow this round.
You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
Bullseye isn’t too hard, conceptually, to play, but it can be a little tricky at times. The game is played over a series of rounds (depending on player count; at lower player counts you play two rounds per person, at higher player counts you play one).
Each round, one player chooses one of the two category cards they drew and passes it to the player on their left (and closes their eyes). That player writes an example of the card on the back and shows it to the other players. The start player opens their eyes and every player chooses a clue word to try and help the start player guess. Here’s the tricky part. You’ve picked a clue word, but you only get to write one letter down! Once you’ve done that, the start player can choose to guess or not. If they guess wrong, no points and the round ends. If they guess right, they score the points above the rightmost letter on the arrows. If they decline to guess, everyone passes their arrow to their left and goes again. This time, you have to add a letter to the arrow you were passed. Hope you can figure out that player’s clue! If not, you can add an underscore (___) to indicate that you’re leaving it blank.
Play continues until you’ve played the appropriate number of rounds. Total your score and see how you did!
Player Count Differences
With three players, there’s a slight gameplay shift in that you have two arrows instead of three, and you essentially play the game two-handed. You’ll pass your leftmost arrow on and pass your right arrow into the left spot and receive your other co-player’s leftmost arrow and et cetera. This does mean that you’ll essentially write two letters every round, and in the first round you’ll have an opportunity to write two letters on one clue. That’s an excellent time to try and use the harder-to-guess clue you have since you’ll have more time with it and pass the easier-to-guess clue on. That’s about the only major difference, though; with more players, you just have more clues in play, which generally helps? As long as other players know what kind of clue you’re attempting to give. No major preference, otherwise.
Strategy
- Similar to The Same Game, you do kind of want to pick a commonly-known example of the category to shoot for. It’s hard enough to guess correctly, and this is a cooperative game; you really want to try and make the word you’re picking as easy to guess for everyone as possible.
- Know your group! Don’t pick a category your co-players might know next to nothing about. One of my friends doesn’t know a lot of US pop culture, for instance, so picking something about movies or TV is pretty tough for them. If they’re picking my clue, especially, they may have trouble hitting something that’s going to be easily guessable.
- It’s … okay if you don’t know what clue your co-players were trying to give. You can sometimes make that work for you. You can just add an ____ to the space and hope that the next player can fill it in. An underscore? A blank? I’m leaning towards the underscore, hence the “an”.
- Do try to pick clues that would be somewhat obvious to both the guesser and other players. Picking a less-obvious example is fun for a category game where you’re playing competitively, but if you’re playing a cooperative game you want to make it as easy as possible for folks. Try to pick common or particularly memorable ones.
- Generally speaking, clues fall into two broad categories: narrowers and confirmers. A narrower helps you generally understand more about the clue but might leave you between a few different words. If the clue was “DOCTOR”, “medical” or “health” might be good. You don’t necessarily know if it’s DOCTOR or NURSE, but you know it’s likely a medical health field. If your clues are “WHO” or “HOUSE”, those are confirmers: if you suspect it’s “Doctor”, then Doctor Who and Doctor House can really confirm those ideas. If you have no idea what the clue is, then “WHO” and “HOUSE” do nothing for you; you need narrowers to help narrow the field. Try having a fix of both.
- Skipping a clue isn’t great, but sometimes it’s all you can do. If you genuinely don’t know, you can try adding on a letter towards a legitimately helpful clue, but it may be better to just add an underscore. If you’re skipping guessing, that happens a lot as well. You can’t necessarily expect to hit 20 points on the first go.
- Try to clear your brain before you look at the first set of clues given to you; if you go in with preexisting ideas, you’re likely to experience some confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a nasty thing; you think you’re right about a clue and every other clue you see tells you that you’re even more right. Try to shake that off so you can stay open to what other people are going to say.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- I just like word games. They’re pretty much always a fun category of games, especially for party games. I do think there’s some English-language bias to that sort of thing, but it’s been a favorite category since I started gaming, I think. Started with Anomia and now we’re here.
- I think getting to place a dot or an X on the bullseye is fun. It’s a nice way to mark the score, even if it’s not particularly great from a “consistent recording of the score” standpoint. I recommend using an X or something easy to see, read, record, or remember.
- I like that another player gets to choose the example of the category for you to guess, rather than it just being on a card. It makes the game a bit more dynamic beyond just running out of cards, because different contexts will produce different ideas. Different things mean different things to different groups also! You can stay frosty about it.
- The categories in question are also particularly interesting. They’re broad and vague, which isn’t common. Things like “number” or “year” or “art supply”; there’s a lot you can pull from that, which gives you a lot of options and is relatively unique. That’s fun! I haven’t seen it a lot. It can make the game pretty challenging, though!
- There’s a lot of dry-erase stuff in the game proper, which is also nice. It’s clean and easy to use, I suppose. Pretty much everything is dry-erase! The cards, the arrows, the target? Very helpful.
Mehs
- It can be a bit frustrating to only get to use 5 letters. That limits your clue options pretty considerably and forces you to choose words more carefully. Avoid unnecessary prefixes and such; they’ll just get cut off.
Cons
- I wish there were some way to help players avoid writing the same clue down. You can’t / shouldn’t really coordinate with players, so you may get the same clue coming from multiple players. That’s not terribly helpful, since it doesn’t give any new information (but it somewhat weights that clue as more common or more important, I guess?). You can’t even necessarily tell if it’s the same clue until you have a couple letters in place, at which point you specifically know you’re not getting more information. It’s an odd outcome.
Overall: 7.5 / 10
Overall, I like Bullseye! I think it plays similarly to Red Letter, Yellow Letter (more in concept than in practice) as it forces you to think about a category-style party game in a different way. We’re very used to connecting words and meaning, which is great for party games, but these games ask us to think more about words as abstract collections of letters that are still tied to their meanings. We can mess with the letters and the order and the ideas, but the meaning still needs to come across, which is super fun. Just an odd way to approach it. The obvious weirdness here is that spelling the words one letter at a time is interesting (though I think Phantom Ink‘s approach and aesthetic appeal to me a bit more). Full cooperative play here is a good note, though getting limited to five letters means that really the second or third letter can make or break you, so you need to think critically about the word you choose and the clues you give. Where I think Bullseye stands out most is that the categories are super weird, but in a fun way. Having to clue a specific year? A specific number? It’s nearly comical. More games should have absolutely off-the-rocker categories. I think that they’ve nicely refined and targeted the difficulty to make the game more entertaining as a result. It just takes some time to get it all figured out, so expect your scores to increase over subsequent plays. If you’re interested in more category-based party games (a staple of any party game library), you fancy yourself a word game Robin Hood (whether or not you’re into the fox), or you just like weird categories, I’d recommend checking Bullseye out!
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