You can tell that a designer is crushing it when I start mentally checking other games against theirs. Case in point, Jasper Beatrix — a design collective, not a singular person — has now crafted one of my favorite word games in Typeset, one of my favorite tableau-builders via Scream Park, and a pair of deduction titles, Signal and Here Lies, which have more or less ruined other detective games for me. Also, there’s Corvids. There aren’t enough games like Corvids for me to name-check it against.

Thing Thing is Jasper Beatrix’s attempt at a party game. As these things go, it displays the collective’s trademark good humor and cleverness. But it’s also the first of their titles that doesn’t fill me with a desperate need to share it with as many people as possible.

Can you guess the category?

Imagine this. You are given a hand of seven cards. Never mind, you don’t have to imagine anything. I’ll draw some at random from Thing Thing’s deck:

Nile River. Lavender Shampoo. Burner. Elizabeth II. Play. Candy. Sleep.

Your objective, in the grand old fashion of countless card games, is to shed your entire hand. To accomplish this, you must come up with a category that covers as many cards as possible. “Things I can’t do without,” perhaps? “Objects I have accidentally ingested.” “Smellier than you would expect.” “Prone to unanticipated combustion.”

These categories, as you can see, can be more or less anything. They can range from broad strokes to Bilbo Baggins “What have I got in my pocket?” garbage. Once per game, Thing Thing even lets you resort to a grammatical category. “Words with B in them.” “Single-vowel words.” That kinda nonsense.

Of course, this being a party game, anybody can challenge your inclusions. “Hey, ‘sleep’ is not prone to unanticipated combustion,” someone might say, to which they will be treated to a lengthy discourse about the frayed power cord of your sleep apnea machine. Or perhaps nobody will contest anything, instead accepting that everybody is operating in good faith. Like other Jasper Beatrix games, there’s a certain vagueness to these discussions, one which could easily be read as a gray area in the rules, but which is really the social frisson that these titles thrive on. This is a party game, and will be as good-natured, acrimonious, specific, dirty, or metagamey as your particular group makes it.

But that’s only the first part of the game. Declaring your category isn’t enough to strip your hand bare. (Otherwise, “Cards I was holding in my hand until a moment ago” would be a surefire strategy to winning on the first turn.) Now your friends have their own chance to add a card of their own, one apiece, provided it matches the category and can pass muster with everyone at the table. For each card added to your category, you must draw one.

Just like that, victory comes two steps closer only to stagger one to eight steps back.

As with all DVC releases, the box is small but the contents are mighty.

Along the way, we’re treated to a few of this collective’s signature touches.

Here’s one example. This is hardly the first party game to include blank cards, but here they’re folded into the rules. After each session, the victor gets to write a new word onto one of those cards, permanently imprinting Thing Thing with a sliver of your group’s soul. One friend wrote “Guillotine.” Another, my gun-nut buddy, jotted down “FN Five-SeveN.” I intend to add “Henry Cavill Body Pillow” for my sister-in-law’s sake. If I ever win. Which I will not, because in my group this is very much a game about not letting Dan win because he wins too many normal games.

A certain board game reviewer, who I will not name but who is known for wearing vivid fedoras (and to whom I am legally contracted as a body double), noted that the math of Thing Thing doesn’t shake out. That you will always gain as many or more cards than you shed. Depending on one’s measure of creativity, this might prove close enough. Normie categories will indeed be flippantly abused by your fellow players. It’s necessary to get specific, to root around in your noggin for something a little bit weirder than whatever first sprang to mind.

To wit, in one session, my wife tried to use the category “Robs from the rich to give to the poor” to shed her final card, Robin Hood. Most of the group couldn’t bend their cards to match the category, but two challengers gave it a shot. I tried Marianas Trench, which robs millionaires of their budget-submersible-riding lives and returns hope and delight to the masses. This was soundly rejected. (See the previous rule about not letting Dan win.) My brother-in-law, however, successfully argued that Godzilla robs real-estate developers of their property and gives scavengers the opportunity to scrounge for copper. He won. Because in Thing Thing, you don’t win on your turn. You win by fudging everybody else’s categories on theirs.

Arguing over each card.

That fuzziness is the defining characteristic of Thing Thing, and it proves both the game’s greatest strength and its most limiting factor. Thing Thing is about arguing with your friends. It’s the sort of game that produces lots of loud laughter and occasional flashes of wicked insight, but doesn’t vary much from one session to the next. Arguably it doesn’t need to.

Still, the title I keep returning to is Peter Hayward’s Things in Rings, which swims in similar waters, brackish with vague categories and negotiable definitions, but puts a twist on the formula by asking players to deduce its categories rather than formulating them outright. Also, its box is even smaller, in case size matters to you.

Thing Thing is the lighter of the two, less taxing on the old gray matter. In the end, it’s a perfectly enjoyable party game. For the first time from Jasper Beatrix, though, this one is insubstantial enough that I keep searching for a firmer handhold.

A complimentary copy of Thing Thing was provided by the publisher.

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