The Last Letter

Here is another game that is so simple it's complicated.  It's an interesting case story of a tiny set of rules that's just filled with holes.  It lead to a lot of incomplete moments.

How simple is it?  There's a deck of big cards with detailed, cluttered (and VERY weird) drawings with lots of things in them.  You deal 5 cards to each player then somehow choose a starting word (rules gap).  We did this by truning over the next card, and the first person who says a words, that's the starter word.  Then, players just look at their cards and try to find a word for something in the picture that BEGINS with the LAST letter of the last word played.

But here's what actually happened: too many words end in E, and we can't find any words for that, so I started just pointing out an eye and saying EYE, but then we were stuck with another E- word.  Technically, you can't repeat a word that has already been used, but we could have said EYEBALL the next time.  We quickly decided to not allow body parts, because every picture had something with hands, legs, feet, elbows, meh.  We decided not to allow colors (the rules gave this as a suggestion) because we don't all see colors the same way.

For most of the cards, the first time was saw them, one of us would mutter "what the F-- is that thing?", which was fun in an expected way.  But the art style didn't really help.  We needed an M word, and I blurted out "mutated owl monster".  Why not give identifiable, non-subjective objects?  It hard enough to find a word when you can tell what the lumpy blue thing is, or why everyone has socks on their heads (or whatever).  On the upside, when you look closely, there are a LOT of fun tiny details.  In one of the images, which showed a football game (I think), all the players had chess pieces on their jerseys, opening up a lot of words for play.

Also, you only get 5 cards?  It takes maybe 3 minutes to blaze through those, and the rules don't really say what to do.  I figured we could start with more cards for a longer game, AND when a player goes out they should score the number of cards the other players were left with.  But with the confusion over words and objects we weren't sure we wanted a longer game.

It was a head-scratcher.  It has potential, it has quirky art, and it should have just flowed.  I think the next time we try it we need to allow colors and body parts but remember the key rule that you can't repeat a word already played in that game.  But some letters just suck.  One card has a sphinx on it.  But I didn't see an x-ray or xylophone anywhere, even if it was on some card, unless a player happened to have one of those the game would be stuck.  When this happened, we agreed on "stuck", flipped anouther card and called out the first thing we saw, just to have a way to continue.

Maybe we could get the hang of it with a few more hands.  So much of this could have been solved with clear artwork.  Though, if we add bluffing, and say that the weird thing I'm pointing at is a "crusty penguin" then that's what it is at that moment.n

Odd.