Just One's "land mine" cards
My friends and I have been striving for the perfect score of 13 in Just One, and there's almost always one or two cards which make it seemingly impossible unless you're very lucky.
Just One if you're unfamiliar, is a game where your teammate wants to guess a word -- and you each independently give a one-word clue, "Donkey", "Dreamworks", "Ogre". If two or more players write the same word, all those clues get hidden -- so your clues can't be too obvious.
The words vary absurdly in difficulty from words like "Wine" and "Snake" where you can basically break the game by listing wines and snakes -- to words like "Mexico" and "Strawberry" where you can come at them from a few directions. ...But about 10% of the words are things like "Grotto", "Couscous" and "Ramses" where honestly, you could possibly sit down with someone for 30 minutes describing them in excruciating detail, and they might still not come up with those particular words. Could you describe "Couscous" to your 10-year-old nephew who lives on Chick-fil-A and Mcdonalds? Could you disambiguate a "Grotto" from a cave, cavern, bunker or lair? Sometimes it's a vocabulary thing but more often, it's just words with a lot of synonyms.
I call these "land mine" cards and I'm curious if anyone else has noticed this phenomenon. Have any of you gotten a perfect score in Just One? If so did you randomly dodge these land mines or did you overcome them with a really perfect clue?
Just One on boardgamegeek, for those unfamiliar with it.
We have never gotten a perfect score while playing Just One and by the rules, but I'd also say most times we are just playing it until we go through enough cards to get bored of the game. Another variation you can play is that one person goes through the entire card 1-5 in order, and if anyone cancels each other out they are out for the rest of the card. And once you get one wrong, move on the next player. It's a lot of fun to see if you can get through all five words on a card.
Ramses is usually ends up being a miss if someone ends up picking that one! I'm pretty sure we have never guessed Grotto correctly either.
It's definitely a favorite game though because you can play it with anyone, not just people that are into board games. And I find it a lot more fun than Cards Against Humanity and some other party games.
I love playing it win or lose, it is always very fun and I love the conversation it starts!
We got 12/13 this Saturday -- we were playing with new people and "Band" came up. I was certain everyone would be obvious and say "Beatles", "Nirvana", "Oasis", "Styx" -- so I tried to go a little more niche and went with "Kajagoogoo" since I was 100% sure 1) it was ONLY a band, as opposed to Nirvana or Styx which had secondary mythology meanings and 2) nobody else would name it
Instead, our teammates had a different take on the game and our cluegiver was left with the clues "Head", "Rock" and "Kajagoogoo". She had no idea what Kajagoogoo was (i think she's in her early 30s, in hindsight it was a poor choice" and it cost us our win as the only thing she could think of was Easter Island statues and she chose to pass
I will get my perfect game some day!!
I remember getting a perfect score at least once. Just saying, according to the rules a player may veto a term they're not familiar with, so if you're unsure who Ramses was or what exactly a grotto is you can block the term and the guessing player picks a new number. We often play with one participant who knows basically none of the great blockbuster classics, so when playing with her we insta-block any Star Wars references, for example.
I guess there's sort of a weird metagame there where you veto terms that you don't like! I don't know if I really love that one and would prefer an "honest win" without any vetoes
I've jokingly suggested a "strategy" where we all pick the number "1" instead of randomly choosing numbers 1-5 -- that way we only have to memorize a fifth of the words 😀 of course i am not serious. I don't care about winning that much, but ONE perfect game would be nice wouldn't it?
The "vocabulary" problem came up this past weekend when the word "Camembert" came up and two people didn't know what it was. One of them gave the clue "Ernie" (ernie and bert from sesame street?) and the other gave the clue "Sash" (...they were thinking of a cummerbund... close!!!)
Not really don't like... But think about it, what makes "grotto" so hard to describe? Are you sure you know exactly what a grotto is? I mean I have a mental image, but I'm pretty sure if I were asked to define it I'd get it wrong. And the game is absolutely meant to be played as "describe a term while balancing obviousness with helpfulness" and not as "be quizzed about your ability to exactly describe obscure words", so personally I wouldn't feel bad about vetoing words that aren't in my active vocabulary for example.
You miss out on hilarious misunderstandings, though, like in the examples you gave. That may be more important than keeping score :).
Well, I think the difference between "grotto" and "Ramses" (or in your case Obi-wan) is that "Ramses" is a niche word, and "Grotto" is a hard word.
Some people will see Ramses and clue, "Commandments", "Pharoah" and oh! oh yeah, Ramses. But nobody on the entire planet will see "Grotto" and clue "cave", "manmade" and oh! oh yeah, GROTTO!? No they'll be like... Sewer? Aqueduct? Bunker? Foxhole? Hollow? It's just supposed to be a hard word with a million definitions, and a miraculous accomplishment if you guess it.
(Side note: My friend guessed the word "Grotto" successfully with HER family -- their favorite restaurant when they're in Greensburg is Tarantula's Pizza Grotto or something insane. So her clues were Tarantula's, Greensburg, Pizza and she was like... oh okay, grotto!!!)
But yeah aaaaaanywaaaay -- To me skipping "niche words" is like okay, okay, we're not in that niche, Harold doesn't know Star Wars, let's keep the game fun. But skipping "hard words" is just -- the designer made one game, but you want to play a different game. I totally understand why you'd skip it (probably for the exact same reason!) but at that point, you're not playing the same game
Here in UK, the places you take your kids to see Father Christmas is Santa's Grotto. (I'm not sure if it used to be called Father Christmas's Grotto before Santa arrived from USA, I can't remember.) So maybe the word is there because it's a UK word list?