We love a good word game, creative thinking game around here and the Clarendon’s Merriment Mixture of Categories Game from Front Porch fits that ideal.
If you’re been around here a while, you’ll know that we love Scattergories, Word Hunter, Codenames and anything that needs fast word play. (Just no spelling as I have a spelling learning disability.) So when we saw this game we knew we had to give it a try. Would it be different? Would it better than some of our favorites? We had to find out.
In this post, we’ll cover how to play, how to win and if this game is worth adding to your Family Game Shelf. Let’s get into it. The game is rated for players 10 and up and for 2 or more players.
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What You Need
You will need a copy of the game. You can get yours here; Canadians here.
The game comes in a small box that fits in your hands. Inside is 80 double-sided category cards that are in a potions bottles. So that makes 160 categories to play with.
How to Play Clarendon’s Merriment Mixture Categories Game
To start, the first player flips over the top card and reads out the category. The categories can include Capital cities in Europe, Things that Smell Bad, Words ending in “ing,” or Famous painters.
That player now has a few second to think and must call out an answer that matches the category. Now the person to her left must come up with something for that category. The player to his left must have her own answer.
Play keeps going around until either someone repeats an answer, a player can’t think of an answer, or they take too long to come up with an answer. When one of these things happens, that player is out of the round. The player to his left now must continue the answers.
When only one player is left in the round, they win the card. The next player now flips over the next card and play continues.
How to Win Clarendon’s Merriment Mixture Categories Game
To win, you’ll need to earn 3 category cards.
You can extent this to 5 for a longer game or if you’re playing with fewer players.
What We Like
First, the game box is very small as it is ideal for travel and won’t take up a lot of space on your game shelf. The quality is top notch as well as the artwork being beautiful. The game has a lot of play-ability as there are 160 categories and I’m sure you’ll forget the answer to the first cards by the time you’ve made it all the way through the cards.
We also like that some of the categories are fun like “things that can get you fires” and “animal sounds.” There’s lot of room for creative thinking. We also like that it plays quickly so it make a great filler game or waiting game. It’s also great for when you have a group over.
What We Don’t Like
Our biggest problem is that some of the categories are up for debate like “titles people can have.” We struggled a little with what qualified. Also, there are a lot of geography questions “Capital cities in Europe,” “Countries in Africa,” “Countries that end is a.” You need to do a good shuffle of the cards before you start as most of these cards were one right after another. We also just skipped a few categories as none of us felt we were up to the topic. “Brands of Dutch or Belgian beer” anyone?
Should you Add Ways to Have Fun Clarendon’s Merriment Mixture Categories Game to your Family Game Shelf?
If you love group games, quick thinking games and trivia games then we would recommend adding this game to your collection. It’s great quality with loads of play-ability. It’s size is also a positive as it has hours of fun in a very small box.
You can get your copy here: Canadians here.
Be sure to visit the Family Game Shelf shop where you’ll find tons of fun with seasonal and original games like our Whacky Putt mini golf dice game!
Rating:
Joel:
Julia:
Carrie-Anne:
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