Full disclosure: A review copy of Oh My Word was provided by KOSMOS.

It’s July 4th! I’m writing as I can hear fireworks going off outside, which probably isn’t great from a purely environmental perspective, but, well, I can’t do anything about that. I’m positive that there will be fireworks going off until at least 2AM as locals just do whatever they want. I am relieved at this juncture that I don’t have any pets. But what I do have are board games, and this week, two reviews of said board games. We’re launching into Pre-Gen Con Mode this month, so there’s a lot coming! Let’s start off with a new one from KOSMOS, Oh My Word!

In Oh My Word, players have to rush to come up with examples of various categories. The nice thing is that time pressure always helps when you’re trying to come up with a word. There’s certainly not an entire series of games named after that specific phenomena. Will it help if we add a musical alarm of some kind, randomized to make things even more stressful? No? Well, we’ve already committed to that, so that’s touch. So hit the timer, come up with some words, and don’t get left holding the bag! Will you be able to avoid the Bad Luck Tokens?

Contents

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

Setup

This one goes fast. Just throw the letters into the bag:

Shuffle and set the Bad Luck Tokens nearby:

Flip, rotate, and shuffle the boards, setting four in the center of the play area:

Then, just place the buzzer in the center of them. You’re good to go! Pick a player to start and hand them the bag of letters.

Gameplay

Oh My Word is all speed and all categories. Your goal is to take as few negative points as possible (given by Bad Luck tokens)! Hit the timer to start it! If you’re holding the bag, it’s your turn.

When you’re holding the bag, draw a token! What you get determines what happens next. If you get a Reverse Token, pass the bag to the previous player, and play resumes in the opposite direction. If you get a letter, you have to place it on an empty space on one of the boards and say an example of that category that starts with that letter. Easy! Sort of. Once you do, pass the bag to the next player in turn order.

If the timer goes off before you can pass the bag, you take a Bad Luck Token! They’re worth -1 to -3 points, so hopefully you get a -1. If you take a Bad Luck Token, pass the bag to the next player and start the timer again.

Play continues until you either cover all the spaces on all the boards or all the Bad Luck Tokens get taken. Add up your negative points, and the player with the highest score wins!

Player Count Differences

At two players, this game is going to get nasty. I mean that in a funny way, but given that you’re literally on a timer, most of when you get a chance to take a breather is when someone else has the bag. In a two-player game, you’ve either got the bag or you should be prepared to receive the bag. There’s no relaxing. While that’s very exciting if you’re into that sort of thing, it might be a lot for some players. With more players, you get less of that impending stress, but you’re also sitting around a bit waiting for it to be your turn. It’s a tradeoff. I think your preferred player count is going to end up being how much you want to actively engage with the game, as a result. I like more active play and higher intensity when it comes to word games and party games, so I tend towards the lower end of the player count spectrum. I do like the game a lot at three, specifically because of the reverse token. If you’re not paying attention, you might find yourself out of time with the bag in your hand very quickly.

Strategy

• I’m not entirely convinced reading the board helps you that much. If you spend too much time reading it, you might either hyperfixate on specific words (not ideal) or waste time doing the reading. I usually just kind of eyeball a few random words? It mostly works fine.
• Generally I get my token and then just go for the first thing I can come up with. If you start coming up with words without a category or a category without knowing what letter you’re going to need to use, you’ll end up getting nowhere fast. But once I come up with a few words I can usually skim the board and match up with something. Hopefully, at least.
• Do challenge your opponents, occasionally; sometimes they just say completely incorrect stuff. There’s not an explicit challenge process in the rulebook as far as I read, but still, don’t let people just say whatever they want. Not because I think people will genuinely try to adversarially cheat, but because time pressure causes you to say weird things sometimes and I think players should actually be correct.
• The timer is somewhat randomized; don’t just stall for time if you don’t need to. You cannot guarantee that the timer is going to run for a specific amount of time (to the point that I haven’t even bothered trying to estimate how much time it runs for on average). Don’t focus on the timer; focus on getting rid of the bag as quickly as possible.
• Scan the board; try to read the categories as fast as you can until your brain jumps on one of them. Sometimes reading a certain category will jumpstart your brain and you’ll pop right onto a category example. Sometimes you won’t.
• Going for something easy is never a bad choice. There’s no real penalty for saying something obvious or picking an easy category. In some games, it’s better to go for tougher categories first so that you don’t get bogged down towards the end, but categories aren’t necessarily all created equal; what’s easy for you might be tough for someone else. Instead, just prioritize what you can get through the fastest. Again, don’t get left holding the bag.
• If you can’t think of something, move on. Gotta go fast and all that. I generally just take a beat per category and if I don’t have anything, I look elsewhere. Again, don’t fixate on a specific category and get stuck on that if you can avoid it. Towards the end of the game, when the category options aren’t as numerous, you may not have much choice but to fixate, which, well, that’s how it goes sometimes.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• This game’s quite silly and fun. I appreciate that the category options are pretty all over the place, so there’s not a particular bias that it seems to have, beyond the English-language bias that an English-language category game would have. Plus, the tendency to blurt a random word that’s hopelessly incorrect is pretty common in games like this and pretty funny, so it makes for a funny and quick party game.
• The little music-playing thing is pretty entertaining, and it seems like it’s louder than the version I tried a few months ago. The previous one was too quiet! This is loud and boisterous and the music is silly and, I assume, royalty-free. It sounds royalty-free, at least.
• I like the variety of the boards! There’s a lot of different categories in each board, though I’m intrigued as to why they made the boards so long as opposed to cutting them in half and allowing for more variability between games. Who knows.
• The game gets harder as you answer more categories, which is pretty fun. Players tend to avoid categories they don’t know as well (or just keep getting bad letters for), so as play continues there start to be categories that nobody wants to answer. Unfortunately, as you approach the end of the game, that can be all that’s left. That makes the game a bit more fun, I think, since the last few rounds are extremely difficult. If they’re too hard, then the game will still end from the Bad Luck Tokens being depleted, so that’s fine.
• Seems relatively easy to expand, plus, thematic boards could be pretty fun. I think I just want more boards out of a sense of greed, but I’m right to do so.
• Very easy to teach. Take a token, say an example of a category that starts with that letter. Pass, repeat. It’s that simple. I love an easy party game.
• I love these speed category games. This is one of my favorite types of games, I think. I love coming up with examples of categories, for some reason. I think it’s that it vaguely feels like trivia, but it’s not quite as knowledge-based as trivia. It feels more experience-based.

Mehs

• You might want to precisely legislate when a player gets a Bad Luck Token, just to avoid some player bad behavior opportunities. I’ve played games like this before, and I’ve seen players hold onto the bag for a while and then huck it at the last possible second, arguing that they shouldn’t take the penalty since they were no longer holding it, or similar bad behavior. Just make it clear for everyone when a player’s turn is considered over and what is bad behavior, if you feel like you need to.
• The general “you draw a token that has a random negative value on it” can be a little annoying, so I appreciate they have a less-frustrating variant. If all players take an equal number of Bad Luck Tokens, the game is essentially decided by luck (as whoever gets the highest score wins). I know this is sometimes a problem that comes up in games like ICECOOL that do similar things. To make the game feel a bit less luck-dependent, the game has a variant where each Bad Luck Token is just worth -1. That’s fine.

Cons

• Truly hate that box. It’s essentially everything you can possibly hate about a game box, except for it being a normalish shape. It’s got a weird cutout, it’s a cardboard tuckbox, and the cardboard isn’t particularly sturdy, leading to it getting messed up pretty easily. This is the sacrifice you have to make to keep a game with an electronic component at a $20 price point, but boy howdy do I not like the box.
• Similarly, if you’re releasing a game with an electronic component that requires batteries, requiring a screwdriver is frustrating. I think the assumption is that you would be playing the game at home, where you likely have screwdrivers in abundance in some weird form of American excess. If you’ve picked up the game and brought it somewhere (a bar, a game store, your office), you might not have a screwdriver handy, and then you have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to unscrew a tiny screw otherwise. Ask me how I know. Game doesn’t come with batteries, either, just as an FYI.

Overall: 8.75 / 10

Unsurprisingly, I like Oh My Word a lot! The major downsides for me are more production-based than game-based, since I love category games. Let me just start with how much I dislike the box. I find tuckboxes frustrating and prone to deterioration, and this is a giant tuckbox. I’ve already goofed up the rulebook a bit because the box flaps are long enough that they push and bend the rulebook when you close it. I’m pretty particular about games looking nice, so this is very annoying for me. I brought this game to work to show it to my friends there and also found that it requires a screwdriver to play, so that was a great waste of 15 minutes. These are both very interesting product choices for an otherwise-great game. Oh My Word is dead simple, boisterous, and silly fun. You have to move fast, make mistakes, and bully your friends for making mistakes. All good party game fun. Plus, it comes with its own soundtrack. The button is also satisfyingly tactile to hit, which I think is important? It gives Bop It, a bit. My complaints about the box aside, Oh My Word is a delight and I’m looking for opportunities to play it again, so that’s great. If you’re looking for your next great party game, you love category games, or you just want a loud timer to bother your friends with, I’d recommend checking Oh My Word out!

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