For this Critical Play I decided to play Categories with my friends. While our game has inspiration from Mafia, Spyfall, and more in it’s ways of deception and secrets, the actual mechanic that determines who wins the game is akin to Categories as everyone must subtly mention a thing that fits within the provided category while also not breaking a special rule that they are given. I chose to play Categories to get a better idea of what makes for good Categories with plenty of options while also being discreet with what the category is.
This is an age old game and as such I couldn’t find an attributed creator. It is an analog party game made for all groups of people to play, you can be strangers or friends, you just need to know items within a category, so there is no prerequisite on how well you know the other people you play with. In case you haven’t played before, the game is very simple. Someone picks a category such as Movies or Athletes, and you go around in a circle naming things that fit in that category until someone can’t think of something else or they say a thing that was already said. The mechanics in this game are very similar to ours in that the team has a Password Category that they all must mention something that fits within, and it must be something new. Where it differs is that Categories is more blatant, it’s clear and obvious what the category is and people are just naming items as quickly as possible, where in our game, there is a person who doesn’t know the Password Category, and you don’t want them to figure it out, so you have to not only find an item that fits in the category, but you can’t say something that’s already been said, and you can’t be too obvious about what the category is. There are a few other changes as well, for instance, in an attempt to help the players out, we allow for open conversation so that you can slip your item into your sentence and be less obvious, this way the person who doesn’t know the category doesn’t just get to hear a bunch of things within the category, but instead has to pick out the words they think might fit together. One last change as well is that there is a player who’s role is the mole. This player is trying to sabotage and help the person who doesn’t know the Password Category figure out what it is. So they may try to be a bit more obvious about what the category is, but they have to be careful so they don’t get voted out by their teammates. One thing that may get them voted out is that the rest of the team has a rule within the category that they must follow. Something like, if the category is “Fruits”, the rule may be “You cannot name a fruit larger than a grapefruit.” That way if they hear someone break this rule, they have a better idea of who the Mole is.
I played this game with my friends Shane, Emma, and Camdyn. Shane went first and chose Soccer players as the first category. He said Messi, I said Neymar, Emma said Will Reilly, and them Camdyn couldn’t name one in time, so Camdyn lost. There is an interesting dynamic within this game, where I guess it’s technically zero sum since it’s competitive amongst one another, but there is no winner, only a loser each round. However, my friends and I are all very competitive and love winning, so we kept track over multiple rounds to see who had the least losses at the end of the night = a simple mod that gave us a meta overview of our abilities across multiple categories, and ultimately gave us a winner (not to brag, but yours truly). This was the only mod we added to the game, as the rest of it is super re-playable and enjoyable. There is a clear system, and so there is a clear game. Although the rules are simple, it’t not too simple and causing sensory deprivation, it is exactly as demanding as you allow it to be as you just need to rack your brain for items you know. Although my group was already friends before we started playing, you don’t need to be. This game creates friendships easily as it has close proximity, is draws the similarities between people as you name similar things in categories, there is a high reciprocity as you play off of each others past items and can help each other figure out new ones, and the disclosure is as much as you want it to be – you just say an item in the category and if you don’t want to say one that you think may be weird, just pick another.
