The game I will focus on for this exercise is called Goldfish, AKA Salad Bowl, a party game combining elements of Taboo, Charades, and Password. I was introduced to this game by my boyfriend’s friend group and it has since become one of my favorite games to play with a big group of people. As you can probably guess, the primary aesthetic of this game is fellowship.
In terms of mechanics, each player writes in 3 clues at the start of the game. Teams of 5-6 people take turns drawing clues and guessing them across 4 rounds with the same clues, but with escalating constraints:
- (Round 1) Taboo (describe without using words from the clue),
- (Round 2) Charades (act the clue out),
- (Round 3) Password (describe with one word only), and
- (Round 4) Sounds (sounds only, no words).
The idea is that even though the clues can vary widely, players internalize them through multiple rounds and will be able to recall them even with increasingly difficult constraints.
The open-ended nature of the clues creates an interesting dynamic where players rely on heuristics like recency and significance to pick their clues. The group I play with loves to write inside jokes, memorable past events, or things that literally just happened. When I first joined this friend group, I felt very shy and out of my depth, since everyone had years of history together. I struggled to contribute to conversations or banter when we played other games together, but it felt much easier to get involved when playing Goldfish because the game itself often referenced things that just happened while I was present. Or, when it referenced inside jokes, I could organically pick them up through the game.
One inside joke I learned from this game was “Galapagos Islands,” a clue that referenced the time the friends snuck into the biology building and wrote basic biology concepts on the whiteboards to “prank” the real biologists working there. They drew a Punnett square and wrote terms like “Galapagos Islands” (hence the clue “Galapagos Islands”).
Another time, before we played, I was telling one of the group members about how I like to do hot yoga. He didn’t know what hot yoga was and thought I was saying “hot girl yoga” the way people on social media say things like “hot girl mental health walk.” This caused a lot of laughter and in the following game of Fishbowl, three people wrote in some variant of “hot girl yoga” (which also caused lots of laughter every time it was drawn).
TLDR: The mechanics and dynamics of Fishbowl give me the aesthetic opportunity to not only learn about a social group/group members, but actively construct and embed new collective memories as a newcomer.
