Name: Taboo; Target Audience: Ages 13+, for 6+ players; Creator: Brian Hersch, physical game published by Hasbro BUT also found on https://playtaboo.com/playpage/; Platform: Available physically, but also on web browsers for free!
Last night, I played Taboo with the same group of friends from CS247G (thankfully they’re in this class too or else they’d get tired of playing games) since it was suggested by one of the CAs for being similar in spirit to my team’s game, Filibuster. It was much more fun than my previous Critical Play’s Jackbox experience, which certainly wasn’t hurt by the fact that we played at 8pm instead of 3pm.
Although Filibuster and Taboo satisfy similar psychogenic needs of affiliation, achievement, and information, their approaches to doing so differ and create contrasting dynamics encouraging different kinds of fellowship and challenge.
For context, in Filibuster one player (the “speaker”) is given two decks of cards, one of which contains topics and the other contains three keywords (Fig. 1, 2). The objective of the game is for the speaker to speak on the topic they drew until their timer runs out, repeating one of the keywords as many times as they can without the other players (the “audience”) recognizing what the word is. If the audience figures out what the keyword is, the speaker’s turn ends, they gain points equal to the number of times they repeated the word multiplied by the point value of the word listed on the card, the next player becomes the speaker and play continues.
In Taboo, players are split into two teams (the “guessers” and the “moderators”). The guessers choose one player on their team (the “clue-giver”) to draw a card that contains one keyword and a list of five “taboo” words (Fig. 3). The objective of the game is for the clue-giver to describe as many keywords as they can within 60 seconds without saying any of the taboo words, the guessers to guess the keywords, and the moderators to ensure the clue-giver isn’t using any of the taboo words. After the 60 seconds are over, points are tallied, the teams switch responsibilities, and the round begins again.
The differences between Taboo and Filibuster were obvious to me within the first ten seconds of setting up the game. In Taboo, players are immediately sorted into two teams, automatically giving them allegiances to one another. As the game progresses and their team cycles between clue-givers, each team has opportunities to support and encourage their teammates throughout the round, strengthening their bonds and creating a strong aesthetic of fellowship in the game. Combined, these aspects of the game work to satisfy the players’ psychogenic needs of affiliation.
This is in contrast to Filibuster, as our current implementation does not encourage the same satisfaction of affiliation. Although the audience is put on a team together as soon as the speaker is chosen, since the speaker role simply makes its way around the table, players aren’t strongly incentivized to collaborate with other audience members. This is especially true since our current system gives the first person to guess the keyword correctly a number of points. During playtesting, the audience would occasionally start talking to each other to strategize, but more often than not audience members would just blurt out answers and inevitably give the speaker more time to accumulate points.
Although this dynamic in Filibuster strongly satisfies our need for achievement, it doesn’t create the kind of fellowship or satisfaction of affiliation I was hoping to create in our game. As I played Taboo with my friends I noticed that, regardless of the position you were in, you felt engaged with the game and invested in how the guessers, clue-givers, and moderators were performing, as seen in Fig. 4. Even the moderators, which arguably have the least interesting responsibility in Taboo, were always engaged because they wanted to make sure the other team never got away with saying even fragments of taboo words.
In order to encourage satisfaction of affiliation in future iterations of Filibuster, I would like to playtest separating players into two teams of at least 2 players (4 people total) with one team as the audience and the other as the speaker’s team. The audience has the same goal of guessing the speaker’s keyword, but the speaker’s team has two roles — speaker and moderator. The speaker performs as usual, but their moderator teammate can keep track of the number of times they’ve repeated their keyword and keep time with a stopwatch. In this way, the audience is encouraged to collaborate to guess the keyword now that their points are shared and their goal is to gain more points than the opposing team. This would also increase the moderator’s engagement during the round as they’d feel more encouraged to catch the other team if they accidentally make a guess to give their speaker more time.
