Laughter and inside jokes in Monikers

I first saw the game Monikers on the Shut Up & Sit Down website. The guys did a review on it, and I seriously could not stop laughing at their video.  I totally wanted that game for my next party game night with my friends.

So I finally bought it online and tried out with my group of friends. And like I predicted, it was super duper hilarious and fun. We were still taking about our game a few days after game night. I don’t usually play party games, but if it’s with the right folks, I’m down for anything.

According to the box, Monikers is a dumb party game that respects your intelligence. The game is usually played in teams, but that night we were an odd number, so I decided to have us all play individually. You want a deck of about 40-50 cards for your group to play, and since there were seven of us, I gave people 11 cards and had them pick 7 cards that they liked. Those 49 cards that people picked were shuffled into one deck and this deck is what you play throughout the entire game.

The rules are pretty simple. You and your friends have to guess the name that’s printed on the card through three rounds. The kicker is that each round has a different rule. In Round 1, you can do anything you want. In Round 2, you can only say one word. And lastly, in Round 3, you can only do charades. Each person has 60 seconds to get people to guess, and then it’s passed to the next person.

The cards are random and contemporary. Such examples are She-Hulk, Feminist Ryan Gosling, The black guy from The Shining to Jiro (of the 2011 sushi documentary). We quickly figured out each of us had working knowledge of a chunk of the deck. Round 1 went quickly because we had free reign to say anything. Round 2 had to get more creative but it was helpful knowing some of the answers already from Round 1. And then Round 3 was a challenge! What I loved about this game was that it plays on the inside jokes that accumulated from the first rounds, and it’s such a feeling of accomplishment when somebody guesses the name in Round 3.

Or you could do what my friend did. She kept yelling one of her cards for every clue when guessing the card. And then when that card finally, finally came up, the player whose turn it was pointed to my friend so she could guess her card, and another player scooped it right up from under her. So. Freaking. Funny. Each card has a point value and the team with the most points wins the game. But seriously, it’s all fun and games that you probably don’t event want to keep score!