Trapwords

Today's review is of the 2018 release, Trapwords. For 4–8 people, it takes 45 minutes.

Overview

Trapwords is a party game with two teams. Each team has an explorer who starts the game on the first room tile (game length is adjustable based on how many tiles the group wants to play). On your team's turn, one player is shown a word their team must guess. Then the other team is shown the word, and gets to write down a number of words (equal to the number of the tile the explorer is on) that player cannot say. The player does not know what the words are. The player then tries to give his team enough clues so they can guess, and if he uses a word on the other teams' sheet of forbidden words, he loses the round. If his team guesses correctly, though, the explorer advances to the next room tile. First to make it to the end of the dungeon wins!

game in progress; image from here

Trapwords also has secret cards place next to some room tiles at setup. Those cards are given to the first team who makes it to that tile, and are generally (perhaps always) some sort of 'curse' to make it harder for them on their next turn. The final tile features a 'boss' who must be overcome (an additional restriction making it harder to win). The rulebook is available here.

Review

This game is simply Taboo where your opponents (instead of the game card itself) dictate what words cannot be said and don't tell you what those are, and also adds a few twists. And it is a lot of fun. Not knowing what words to avoid is a huge challenge and encourages great creativity. And there is a level of psychology here, too—have your opponents chosen 'obvious' words for you to avoid, or have they instead picked unexpected options to trip you up? You won't know unless you say a trap word.

Since the other team is picking the words, there are a few rules about word choices: you can't choose generic/vague words ("object," "thing," etc.), inside jokes or foreign languages aren't allowed, and so on. There is a judgment call here, in other words, and you should thus play the game with people 'all in' on having fun and not so competitive that they will get bogged down in the nuances that may arise. That caveat aside, this is a winner, and forces you to draw on your vocabulary skills.

Rating: A