The Fast-Thinking Categories Game 2 to 4 players ages 12 and up
If you’ve been around Family Game Shelf for a while, then you know how much we LOVE the game Scattergories. You can read the full review here and you can see all of free lists we have for holidays in our Fun Library. So when they came out with Categories, we knew we’d have to try it.
In this post we’ll go over the rules, how to play and if we think you should add it to your family game shelf.
Set Up
The set up is easy. First, each player gets a score sheet. Next, ten cards are placed in the center of the playing area beside the stand.
How to Play Categories
To start, one player puts the top card in the stand. Next all players write the letters in the boxes on their cards. After everyone is done, someone reads the clue on the side of the card. This tells the players what they should fill in the words for.
For example ITSBLEACH are the letters to be filled in and the category is things that are white.
Players now have two minutes to fill in as many answers as they can.
In our example it could be:
I – ice cream
T – top
S – snow
B – bathtub
L – lollypop
E – elephant
A –
C – church
H – hat
Scoring Categories
Players score points for answers that are unique. If someone else writes the same answer for the same letter, then neither score a point.
Disputes
When a player has an answer that others don’t accept, they discuss it and vote. For example if someone disputed elephant in the example above, then the player can make a case that there is a white elephant game. The majority rules.
Winning Scattergories Categories
The first player to reach 25 points wins the game.
What We Like
Categories is very easy to play and understand. It seems that the people who don’t do that well in Scattergories do the best, or better, in Categories. There seems to be lots of playability and variety in the game. And as always, the quality of the game is great.
What We Don’t Like
First, the set up for each round seems to take a while—writing out all the letters. And it’s very hard to not look at the writing on the side of the card—giving an unfair advantage. Next, Categories seems harder to play than Scattergories. We find that it’s easier to think of all the words that begin with a letter than all the words that could fit into a category. This could be because we have played Scattergories for years.
The second thing that we find is that the score sheets have a lot of wasted space on them. I write big and I can still get three games out of a sheet. To save sheets, we just draw a line and keep going until the page is full. You can get our updated score sheet in the Fun Library here.
The Last Word
Categories is a different twist on the original Scattergories. Although the game is fun, it lacks just a little when compared to the original. If you love word games and have room, we would recommend making room for Scattergories Categories on your Family Game Shelf.
To shop for Categories see here. Canadians can shop here. Scattergories Categories is a Hasbro game.
To get more Categories score sheets see our Fun Library and you can get themed Scattergories lists also in the Fun Library.
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