Review: What's Yours Like?

• "Mine is well hidden."
• "Mine needs cleaning."
• "Mine is serviced by professionals."

What would you guess is being referenced by the statements above, if they were said to you one at a time by your friends?  You might go for realistic answers... or you might decide to be funny when faced with such open-ended hints.  After some additional clues, the answer for this one turned out to be "House exterior."

Playful, teasing humor is the heart of What's Yours Like?, a game from Patch Products.  Players take turns offering up cryptic - yet honest as applied to them - descriptions of things most people have, like "Bed" or "High School" (Patch categorized the cards such that things that don't apply to kids, like "Job", are all on one side of the cards and are color coded, so you can play with folks as young as 10.)

The fun starts when the player to the left of the player in the "hot seat" draws a card, places it in the special card sleeve to hide it from the hot seat player, and passes it around to the other players.  Then the hot seat player asks the player to the left, "OK, what's yours like?"  The other player describes what hers is like, and the hot seat player can choose to make a guess.  If the guess is not correct, the next player to the left describes what his is like, and another guess can be made.  Each description/unsuccessful guess means one point for the hot seat player, and whoever ends up with the FEWEST points will be the winner.  The game is simple, deductive, conversational and can get you to know your friends better.

What's Yours Like is an enjoyable game, but it relies heavily on the players to give clever, useful - but not giveaway - answers.   In a recent game, the first hint was "Mine is fragrant," and the second was "Mine rolls."  The intent was likely to fool the player into thinking the object was round or spherical, but perhaps the guesser was a roll-on user, for she quickly guessed "Is it deodorant?"  On the other extreme, especially cagey hint-givers can give a player a hard time by being super secretive or misleading in their clues.   However, the game shines when players hit the sweet spot and give descriptions that are interesting, clever and funny - and JUST revealing enough to help the guesser along a bit.

As with any game where the players provide the content, the game is what you make of it, and with a good group, you are guaranteed to have fun and laughter, whether playing in a family setting or with adults and their adult humor - the game constructs a framework that you the players use as you see fit.  

I like What's Yours Like.  And I'll leave you with one more clue one of my players provided, one surprisingly flexible that could potentially be applied to almost anything:  "My Grandma's smells funny."   (Basement).