For this week’s critical play, I played Monikers. Monikers is an in-person party card game designed by Alex Hague and Justin Vickers following a successful Kickstarter campaign. It’s intended for more mature audiences, aged 17 and up, due to its reliance on pop cultural knowledge which can occasionally lean a bit raunchy. It can accommodate a number of players ranging from a modest 4 to a whopping 20. I ended up playing it with 8.
After discussing my group’s P1 game with a few out-of-class friends, they recommended that we play Monikers together. As someone who enjoys games, I was more than happy to agree. Monikers works as follows. Players are divided into two teams, and everyone is dealt 10 cards from a deck of strange nouns, ranging in points from 1 – 4. The higher the point value, the stranger the noun. Each player then chooses 5 cards which will be added to the play deck.
Once the play deck has been constructed, play can begin with round 1. The game circles around from player to player. Whoever holds the action topdecks as many cards from the playdeck as possible within a 60 second time limit. Their goal is to describe the card to their teammates, who try to perfectly guess the words in black at the top of the card. A round of Monikers concludes when the playdeck has been exhausted, where it is then reshuffled for the next round. In round 1, players can use as many words as they want. In round 2, one word. In round 3, no words, and pure nonverbal performance. This works due to familiarity with the playdeck from previous rounds.
The structure of our games is actually quite similar. At least, they appeal to very similar types of fun, primarily in the fellowship department. Monikers is a team game with every player holding a bit of privileged information, whereas our P1 game, Impromptu, players win as individuals and are unable to draft the deck themselves. The limited playdeck in Monikers highlighted a few metagaming strategies which slightly dampened the joy of acting out a card. How exactly does one act out “El Chupacabra” without words? It is a rather trying task, and in the game I played, when the player looked pained at the card they had in front of them, their team would start slinging out strange 4 point cards from their memory. Occasionally it worked! Due to the speed pressure of the rounds as well, stranger and more interesting cards would get skipped in favor of the low-hanging fruit.
You can pretty easily act out Achilles, but I did struggle to put on a performance of Yoko Ono. On the other hand, everyone struggles with this, and one could very reasonably argue that it is a feature and not a bug! Point values are difficult to balance as a consequence of this, but as I think about it, perhaps it is a part of the drafting strategy. There are plenty of high point cards that are difficult to describe initially, but given a bit of familiarity with the card pool, can be performed in round 3 quite easily. You could theoretically draft for later rounds, but there is no guarantee that your team will get to answer the card, and the limited perfect information advantage you have of your own cards contents weakens drastically as the rounds progress, and even in the span of the same round. If you see a card as a player, but no one on your team can answer it, you will be better equipped to answer it as the round itself progresses. This leads me to conclude that, like most games, you should probably just draft whatever you think will be most fun in Monikers rather than try to powergame it. That didn’t stop me though, and my 5 cards consisted exclusively of 3 and 4 point cards. Numbers mean everything!
In Impromptu, there is no drafting. You topdeck a card from the acting deck and are forced to perform your half of a pair performance. It is very similar to Monikers in that the audience constantly attempts to guess the performance in front of them, but nobody has information on what the deck contains. I actually have to thank Monikers quite a bit for getting me thinking of how to avoid some of the metagaming aspects that existed in that game. I actually quite enjoyed Monikers, don’t get me wrong! But round 3 had a bunch of hilarious performances, and a lot of degenerate point seizing symbolism. There is nothing inherently wrong with those strategies, but I would prefer Impromptu to try and center around earnest acting and improvisation. Were you to replay Impromptu repeatedly with the same group, each of you would eventually learn what every single card in the acting deck is. I wonder if this would be interesting in its own right, as performances would grow more abstract and symbolic rather than literal similar to the Monikers format. One method of ameliorating this would be to simply scale up the Acting deck to a large N card count, but that would simply kick back the problem. An alternative could be to take advantage of combinatorics and instead make two or more acting decks of Adjective Noun pairs. Rather than what currently exists in the lines of “shady street merchant,” shady could be in a deck, and street merchant could be in a deck. It would be a cheap way to get N2 and could prove a worthy dam against the metagaming flood. The escalating round structure of Impromptu and Monikers is quite similar as well. In Monikers, the game transforms from verbal description to nonverbal acting. In Impromptu, rounds introduce hazards and other scenario differentiators. The gradual information growth in Monikers lends itself excellently to the subsequently limiting rounds and I found that to be a very thoughtful structure.
I quite enjoyed Monikers! Thanks for making me play it.
Khaled Messai
