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Many of the best board games and party games take their cues from classic concepts that predate them. Several parlor games of the 19th century, for instance, found life in the 20th century as board games: Pictionary draws inspiration from the parlor game of charades, while Balderdash is a board game based on the parlor game Fictionary. As the saying goes, what’s old is new again.
With the rise of the internet in the 21st century, one would think that board games would be on the decline. And the reality is that the market isn’t what it was decades ago. But board games still have an audience, and they are viewed by some analysts as a growing market. There can even be a synergy between physical games and what’s online: board games can be adapted for online play, or online concepts can make their way onto board games.
One internet trend has the feel of — ironically enough — a parlor game. Sometime in the late 2010s, social media and message thread users posted memes and captions with the prompt, “wrong answers only.” People responded in the comments, and the results were, and are, often hilarious.
It seems at least one company decided to tackle converting the social media pastime into a physical game. During a recent trip to Aldi, we took note of a small collection of board games being sold as limited buys in advance of the winter holidays. One of them was all about wrong answers only.
We decided to find out if the party game lived up to the calling.
Overview:
Wrong Answers Only is an Aldi Find. It’s in stores for a limited time, and once it’s sold out, you won’t be able to find it again until it comes back, whenever that might be. If you don’t see them in your stores, you’re out of luck.
At the time of this post, the game sold for $16.99. The game is not an Aldi-exclusive and can be found on Amazon for $24.99, so from a price point Aldi looks to be the best place to find it. The game is made by Gray Matters Games, a company that makes a handful of party games. Aldi sold a few different Gray Matters Games products as part of a mixed case that included Game of Wolf, Root Beer Float Challenge, and, of course, the game that is the object of this review.
The contents. (See if you can spot the typo.)
The game comes out of the box with the following.
- 100 double-sided cards
- 8 answer boards
- 1 score board
- 8 markers
- 1 instruction manual
The game is marketed for 4-8 players, ages 14 and up, and is estimated to take about 30 minutes per play session.
The bottom of the box summarizes the game like this:
- Reveal the question
- Write clever wrong answers
- Match answers to players
- Be the last player to have your wrong answer matched
More on this in a moment.
Design:
The build quality is generally good. The box makes a good first impression, with wit on just about every side. The cards, boards, and markers all feel sturdy. We did find that the markers were on the small side and some of the marker erasers will flake off a little during use, but whiteboard markers and erasers aren’t hard to come by.
The game also has a nice stack of prompts. It comes with 100 double-sided cards for a total of 200 questions. It’s not an endless supply, but there’s enough here for hours of playtime. (We found one small typo on a card, but it wasn’t a big deal.) We thought the prompts were nicely varied, from fill-in-the-blank to question style, from vintage to pop-culture modern. Not every prompt landed, but the vast majority of them did, and the beauty of a game like this is that even less-than-stellar prompts can be okay because it’s all about wrong answers anyway.
Gameplay:
In the rules, players take turns being a reader. It’s the reader’s job is to collect the answers, shuffle them face down, and then turn them face up. Then players, starting to the left of the reader, take turns guessing who wrote which wrong answer. If they guess wrong, the caught player is eliminated from the round. The round ends when only one player hasn’t been matched to the wrong answer. A correct guess earns a player 1 point, while being the last player remaining gets 3 points.
It wasn’t hard for us to detect problems with the rule execution as we got into the game. Smaller groups, especially ones who are familiar with each other and everyone’s handwriting, are going to have a very different experience than larger groups. We tested this with a family of four, and suffice to say that there isn’t a lot of guesswork trying to figure out who said what. A large group of eight who don’t know each other well might get more out of the core gameplay.
We also felt like the rules as listed create a different incentive than the social media inspiration. Online, the goal is to come up with the funniest answer, and other users essentially vote by way of likes and upvotes. In this game, though, the goal isn’t to come up with the funniest answer — it’s to come up with the answer least likely to be identified as yours by other people. It changes the motivation, and in doing so we think it changes the answers. Instead of getting creative, it’s about maybe toning down the answer so it’s not too obvious who wrote what and concealing one’s handwriting.
In our view, it seems less fun. It’s less fun for the writer, who has to calculate their answers on factors other than a funny or witty answer. It’s less fun for the reader, too, who can’t soak in the answers as much because now they’re trying to guess who said them. We feel like it moves the spotlight from the power of the words to the deception of the writer.
The rules also create a practical problem given the provided materials. The game is played on small whiteboards that you write on and then erase. We found that when we flipped our boards face-down as per the game’s instructions, the marker came off, leaving smudges on the table and rubbed off words on the board. As the game requires the reader to literally shuffle the boards on the table before picking them up, this is no small design flaw. (If you have a tablecloth, dry erase marker can stain.) Paper and pen would have been a better fit for what the game asks of players.
On reflection, we wonder if the game might have been better served with a different ruleset. Instead of identifying the user like you see in, say, Blank Slate, perhaps it might have been better to use a system where a judge picked the best answer, like you see in Apples to Apples or What Do You Meme?. It’s certainly possible that the game designers avoided those because they already are common, including in games that derive from social media. Still, we think that maybe the road more travelled remains the better road.
We eventually decided to discard the printed instructions and just play it our way, which was reading the cards, having everyone write down their answers, taking turns showing their answers, and then coming to a consensus on the winner. Not the way it was intended, but we made lemonade out of it.
The Verdict:
Wrong Answers Only sets out to imitate the underlying idea behind a popular meme, and in some ways it succeeds. The large stack of cards contain a variety of prompts that range from pop culture to classic lines, and they do a lot to promote social community. It’s a party game, for sure.
Unfortunately, the stock rules of the game — which are based on figuring out who said what rather than who came up with the best line — fell flat with us. We thought the pick-out-the-writer approach was maybe a case of overthinking the concept, although perhaps other board gamers might disagree. We also found that the whiteboard design of the game rubs off on the table when used as the rules state, not ideal when you’re trying to play the game as intended.
We think this is still a fun game with great social potential, thanks to the stack of prompts. For some gamers, though, custom house rules might be better rules. That was true for us.
