Most of you have heard or have played this game. But for these who haven’t- this is a word game where you have two teams (Red and Blue) that are competing against each other to try to be the first team to collect all their clue word cards before the other team does. You start the game by selecting your two teams- it is recommended to have at least 3 people per team. Then you take 25 clue word cards from a pack of 400 and lay them down in a 5 x 5 grid. Then each team chooses a person to be the clue giver for the round.

There are 40 key cards, and one of the clue givers will select one of these cards, and only the two clue givers will be able to see this card- each key card is a 5 x 5 grid image, and it tells the clue givers which word belongs to their team, by the color of each position in the grid.

The clue givers will then take turns giving one- or two-word clues to their respective teams with the goal of trying to get their team to find all “their” words for the round, before the other team does. Usually, each round one team has one more word than the other. One team might need to get 8 words, and the other needs to get 7, for example. But the clue giver cannot give out any of the actual words, or any part of the word. For example, maybe the blue team has the following words HORSE, MASS, PLACE, TURKEY, SCORPION, BOW, and REVOLUTION. Clearly the blue team’s clue giver won’t be able to link all of these words at once. But the strategy would be to try to link as many of these as they can so their team can collect more words during a turn. So, the clue giver might say “Three- animals”. That tells their team that there are 3 words on the grid that matches the clue given. So, the team would want to look at the grid for 3 animals or 3 words that might be associated with animals. They might then find HORSE, TURKEY, and SCORPION.

If a team accidentally guesses wrong, their turn is over- and not only that, if they accidentally guess a word that belongs to the other team, that team gets that word. There are a few more details to the rules, but that is the gist of it. It’s a fun game to play with family and friends. I enjoy playing this and getting creative with ways to try to link as many words as possible when I am the clue giver.