Mime Things That Can’t be Named, and Don’t Ask the Best Ghost Where the Mine Turtle Is | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

How many new and upcoming party games can be described in at most two sentences? That’s my challenge today.

▪️ In Jasper Beatrix‘s Thing Thing from DVC Games, you can ditch two or more object cards from your hand by naming a category that links them all, but others get the chance to ditch appropriate cards of their own, which will cause you to draw more cards that you don’t want.

▪️ In Mime Battle from Rémi Mathieu and IELLO, 4-12 players compete in two teams to guess a mimed word or phrase, with both teams miming at the same time using words that are related or perhaps identical.

▪️ Where is That?: Europe and Where is That?: South America is a pair of party games from Magnus Karlsson and Erik Andersson Sundén that Fractal Juegos will have SPIEL Essen 25 in which players try to build maps on the table using cards that show part of the region in question.

▪️ Big Potato‘s Add to Playlist splits players into two teams, each of which builds their own playlist on their phone’s music app, with a particular player choosing a song for one of five revealed categories. Score by guessing who chose a song, which category that song fits in, and (ideally) both at the same time.

▪️ Another Big Potato release is What’s the Best Thing? from Ed Naujokas and James A. Vaughan, in which each round 2-10 players get a different category and a number from 1-10, after which they name something from that category that they would rank in that slot, with 10 out of 10 being best. Everyone then tries to line up all the answers from low to high to avoid losing lives.

▪️ And in November 2024, Big Potato released Don’t Press That Mine Turtle, in which you present someone with a truth-or-dare card from hand and either they wuss out and have to press the mine turtle as many times as the card states or they say or do the thing asked after you which you press the turtle. Whoever explodes loses.

▪️ Apparently this is now just a Big Potato round-up, with Phil Walker-Harding‘s Don’t Fall for It! being a team game in which you must pull a plank from a tower(!) if you incorrectly identify something as being a member of a category. Pull the wrong plank, and cubes fall from inside the tower, with your team losing if you collect eleven or more.

▪️ Each round in Ghosts Can’t Draw, also from Naujokas, Vaughan, and Big Potato, players place a hand on a Ouija-style plastic ghost with a marker in it, then they move it on a white board with one player having secretly received a word to draw. Players try to guess who the ghost was, then try to identify the word from an array of choices.