LogFAQs > #941877945

2. Time's Up! Title Recall (2008)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Clue-giving, limited communication, memory, real-time
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 25-40 minutes
Experience: 50+ plays with 3-10 (2016-2019) incl Time's Up, Monikers
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 1/100 (2018)

Summary - Not a designer game at all, Time's Up! has been branded as "Celebrity," "Fishbowl," and "Monikers." There is a deck of cards with titles of movies/books/games/shows on it. On your turn, a timer is flipped, and your job is to get your partner(s) to guess as many cards as you can from the top of the deck. The deck is passed at the end of your turn. When the deck is emptied, the cards are shuffled back and play resumes, but with new rules. In the first pass, anything goes as a clue. In round 2, the cluegiver is restricted to a single word. In round 3, no words are permitted, only charades-acting.

Design - It's probably worthwhile to reiterate that in my love of Time's Up!, I don't particularly credit the publishers/credited designers of this mass-market publication. It's a parlor game that you can literally play with a fishbowl. The best aspects the publishers gave are 1. an excellent list of words to guess and 2. a nice timer and 3. a solid rule-set.

To me, titles of works are simply more accessible and enjoyable to guess than people, where if you don't know them, you just don't know them. You can usually try to piece together ways to clue someone in on "Game of Thrones" if they don't know it (albeit perhaps not in time); however, "Tyrion Lannister" would by significantly less guessable by someone with zero knowledge. The titles in TU:TR are diverse and popular; most people familiar with American/western culture will know most of the printed words, and there will be a few that people don't, which adds to the fun. You'll get to see who knows what, and gaps in people's knowledge can lead them to explore further. (I learned about the song "Take Me Home Country Roads" thanks to TU:TR!) It's a nice trip through the cultural and pop cultural canon.

The timer for TU:TR is well-suited to my tempo. For my money, if the words are relatively known, then almost everyone can successful clue for at least one word. But it also remains tight enough that later rounds can be tough, and it generally prevents people from running out the deck before everyone gets a shot.

Finally, I think a few rules in the edition I played are key. There's no skipping in round 1, where free talking is allowed. This forces people to reckon with the same difficult cards at length, til they're ingrained on your brain. In rounds 2 and 3, skipping is permitted; however, when you do so, you lose the chance to guess that word. As an extra note of pressure, if you guess wrong, you auto-lose the word. This prevents a pure memorizer from just reciting every possibly related word to the clue until getting it right - precision is demanded.

It all creates a tight, enjoyable experience. Time is always of the essence. Memory is a huge equalizer here; if you have no idea what "Game of Thrones" is but someone is able to guess it on the clue "Ned Stark is from this," then round 2 you'll be able to say "Stark!" as your clue, as if you knew it yourself. Because the clues are so limited in rounds 2-3, knowing the wordpool better makes you a more effective guesser as well. The shorthand and rapport that develop in a game always delight.

The only downside I've found with the rules I play with, is that sometimes people just skip in rounds 2-3 way too quickly, instead of trying a dumb clue or acting like an idiot to solicit a guess. In this way, you can hunt for easier words, which does score you more points but feels inevitably unethical to me.

Experience - I encountered Time's Up! in its original "guess the people" form at a meetup. I was waiting to play my then-favorite game Avalon, and we played this as a filler. The snappy energy of it was instantly contagious, hitting my favorite buttons: team play, trivia, speed, clue-giving, acting (something no other game on my list has)... once I got it, I brought it to a different meetup, and playing it with someone there became the basis of another close friendship - quite a fruitful one in gaming terms. It became my absolute favorite way to close a game night.

To me, the game is more fun with the more punishing rules compared to Monikers or the like. A lot of people may dislike the pressure that comes from having to be right on the first guess, or by the short timer, or by the lack of blurb you can read aloud in round 1. Or they might not like not knowing stuff and feel disadvantaged. It's all understandable.

Time's Up! exercises different mental muscles from a lot of designer games. It has a lot in common with Trivial Pursuit and Taboo and Charades and even concentration/memory matching games. But it mixed in opportunity for creativity, binds things together in a game-y way that pulls it beyond "I don't know this word," and pushes people's buttons. I find that the level of engagement in a 4-player (the ideal count) TU is as high as it gets: you're either giving clues, listening for clues, or directly guessing. If played with people of similar skill, it's excellent. You can get measurably better during a single game with a single hot streak - or you could choke and just cave in and let it get in your head.

That engagement is ultimately what put TU so high, and it's what nearly all my favorite games have in common. Codenames lets everyone try to bond with their cluegiver; Avalon forces you to reckon with who is lying while trying to convince others of your own version of the truth. But while the pressures of social deduction and creative wordplay in those games can lead to less overall engagement, Time's Up has one of the absolute highest hit rates in terms of getting people's juices flowing. Whether they rise to the challenge or crack under the pressure - or both in the same 30 seconds - it's always a thrill.

Future - Here's hoping for the pandemic to end for real...
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yet all azuarc of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness