LogFAQs > #934694886

26. Word Slam (2016)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Party game, clue-giving, word game, real-time, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 1-10 minutes per hand
Experience: 50+ hands over 5-10 sessions (2018-2019) with 4-10 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each team has a clue-giver who knows the same word. Simultaneously, they begin clueing their team in... by using a massive deck of word cards, which include both concrete words (green, man, animal, job) and more abstract concepts (up, not). The twist is that while each team can only see its own clues, it can listen to the other team's guesses. The first team to guess a word wins it.

Design - Simple but exceedingly clever. Cluegiving is one of my favorite mechanisms, especially in party games, and Word Slam... well, it is a clue-giving party game. To be fair, it's about as vanilla as it comes in terms of design, but given that it's a "players make the game" situation, that's entirely fine by me.

The twist in Word Slam comes from the fact that cluegivers are giving simultaneous clues for the same word. So you're getting the usual manic energy as a cluegiver scrambles to put together the set of cards that will lead someone to the solution ("round," "food," "yellow," "brown")... but now there's some tension, since you don't necessarily want to guess everything right away. If you're a guesser and you see "round" and immediately start saying "wheel," "basketball" immediately, the other team will quickly deduce that you received the clue "round." If they were first to get "food" and "yellow," they would be highly likely to get "pancake" thanks to your giving away "round."

Word Slam's biggest "learning curve," if you can actually describe the game as having that, is its deck of cards. My friends and I, when we played, would spend a few minutes before the game laying out the entire deck like a massive keyboard. Deciding how to organize the deck so you can access your clue-cards is half the game. It's a solitary half with little madness, but it can be satisfying and empowering.

Experience - A friend got Word Slam in mid-2018, and it immediately became one of our party games of choice for months afterward. With new gaming pal's being lower on clue-giving games and groups overall being smaller, it hasn't really seen any play in a relatively long time for how much fun it is.

Future - I'd gladly play Word Slam again. There are two big strikes against it. The first is opportunity - gaming pal #1 isn't a big fan of word games, so I'm guessing it wouldn't go over amazingly. The second is that Word Slam's niche is rather well-worn: it's not my #1 cluegiving party game, so when the scarce opportunity arises, I may prefer to go a different route.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness