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Wrong Party
You could earn
2585 Victory Points
with this purchase
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Description
What happens when you invite a Baby, your Dentist, a Drug-Sniffing Dog, and a Mall Santa to Slay a Dragon? And what Murder Mystery Party would be complete without a Proud Mom of an Honor Roll Student and a Cult Leader butting heads? If the front row of your Royal Wedding doesn’t feature a Killer Clown, are you really doing it right?
Consider this your invitation to Wrong Party! In this delightfully quirky draft-style card game, compete with your friends to create the GGLOAT—that is, the Greatest Guest List of All Time—by choosing from a variety of mismatched characters and party themes. Will you host the perfect party or kill the vibe?
2-5 player card game
30-60 minute playtime
Throwing a party can be stressful. What music will everyone like? What drinks will your guests prefer? What board game will most people want to play? These are tough decisions, and it’s hard to please everyone. In Wrong Party, a 2-5 player game from Unstable Games and TeeTurtle, you take all the stress away by deciding what sort of party you’re going to throw and then choosing who to invite, thus ensuring you have the hottest party in town.
Setup
At the start of each round, you’ll flip a party theme card over which lets you know which kind of guests you really want to invite. Here you have one of four themes: Family Friendly (yellow), Political (blue), Costume (purple) or Raid (red). You might also draw a dual themed card which has a mix of the two colours, giving you more options for who you choose to invite. The theme cards will also show three of the eight different party attributes that will really make your party jump. Anyone for a Costume/Raid themed murder mystery party with talking, games and fighting?
Each player is dealt a starting hand of six party guests to begin. Most of your guests have a single preferred theme as well as their likes and dislikes. For example, our Conspiracy Theorist friend prefers political parties and likes talking and fighting – who knew?
As with the party themes, some guests have dual preferences, meaning you can have more opportunity to score them at the end of the round. Some potentially familiar faces make an appearance in the deck, with all unicorn guests being wild.
There are also some Effect and Party Guest Effect cards that let you stack the odds in your favour, or sabotage some rival parties.
How It Works
The heart of Wrong Party is drafting your guests. You play a guest card from your hand face down in your party area, discard a guest face up from your hand and pass the remaining cards to your left. This means your sneaky tactics to sabotage someone else by discarding a guest they wanted are in plain sight. When you’ve been passed your next hand of cards, everyone draws from the decks and repeats this, passing cards around until you have five guests at your party.
It’s certainly not complicated, but because you’re drafting face down each time, you really have to remember which guests you’ve selected each turn because the themes all your guests prefer can combine nicely to score you big points.
Once everyone’s drafted five guests, you simultaneously reveal them one at a time from left to right. Any Effect or Party Guest Effect cards are resolved as they’re revealed, meaning that while the Killer Clown you invited to your Family Friendly party might look out of place, they’ve also removed a guest card from each of your opponents get togethers. Being the host with the most can be ruthless!
Scoring
The basic scoring has three components, as well as some potentially hefty end of round bonuses you can add to your total.
Firstly, you score each guests’ base point value. You then score two points for each guest at your party who matches the theme card. If you’ve revealed any dual-themed or wild guest cards, you must specify which colour they are when they’re displayed as that’s an important factor in scoring bonuses.
You also get one point for each like on a party guest card that matches an attribute on the party theme card. However, you also lose a point for dislike on a guest card that matches attributes on the theme card – people will punish you if they’ve told you they don’t like games and you start reaching for One Night Ultimate Werewolf.
Finally, you score your bonuses. If you managed to get three, four or five guests with matching colours, you’ll score 3, 5 or 10 points (regardless of whether they match the theme). If you have a guest of every colour, you’ll also score 5 points. Move your party hat player token up the scoreboard and play two more rounds. The person with the most points after three fabulous parties is the winner!
Why It Works
This isn’t a complicated game by any means. It’s aimed at a 12+ audience but I know that those younger than 12 can easily get to grips with it and will also beat you handsomely given the chance.
The charm in Wrong Party comes from the incredibly cute artwork (with some nice nods to jokes adults might get), the eclectic party themes and the occasional opportunity to knock someone else’s party planning completely off course. Unless you play with five people. you’ll see your starting hand again, but whether the cards you hoped would come back around have been secretly drafted or publicly uninvited via an opponents discard pile can create some friendly(ish) conflict.
There’s a rising element of tension when you draw from the deck at the start of each drafting turn. Getting that fifth matching theme card off the deck and securing 10 points on your last turn is definitely a thrill.
Overall
Wrong Party is fun and it’s simple and sometimes games that tick both of those boxes can be easily overlooked. You get 132 party guest cards and 20 theme cards so there’s a lot of replayability there. The art from Ramy Badie is really cute, and brings a lot of the guests to life. The oblivious Bunny Dressed As A Kitty card, and the silently fuming Kitty Dressed As A Bunny cards are great examples of that.
It’s easy to learn, and pretty quick to play too – allowing about 10 minutes per player will get you through an entire game. It’s also a really great game to play with kids as the art will draw them in and the simplicity of drafting and scoring makes it really accessible too.
You’ve received an invitation to a party. Great! Dust off that banana costume, and off you go! Only you misjudged the dress code… this is a political party… Welcome to the fun of the Wrong Party!
Wrong Party is a 2-5 player card game from Unstable Games, suitable for all the family.
Set Up – I hope you brought pizza!
Each player chooses a coloured party hat to represent them on the scoreboard, starting at 0. The scoreboard is laid out for all to access, either in the centre of the gaming space or to the side. This isn’t needed again until the end of each round.
Next split the cards into their two decks, black backed cards and colourful backed cards, and give them a decent shuffle. The black backed cards are your Party Guests, whereas the colourful backed cards are your Party Themes.
Per Wrong Party round, you will flip a Party Theme card once at the start. This is the event your invited party guests will attend. So how do you procure a guest list?
Each player receives 6 cards dealt from the Party Guest deck. These are for you to know, so keep them hidden from your opponents!
Playing the Rounds
Each Wrong Party round plays the same. Choose one card to keep as an invited guest and one to ban. Lay your invited party guest face down in front of you starting on the left and your uninvited guest in a pile on the right, face up. The banned guests act as a way of stopping your opponents from gaining base high scoring cards, or they may still be of use to you. I’ll discuss this later.
After everyone has finished inviting 1 guest and 1 banned guest, give your hand to the player on your left and grab your new hand from the player on your right. Draw a new card to add to your hand.
Repeat these steps until all cards in hands have been played or banned. Now it is time to reveal who is in your party! This is done going around each player, showing one card at a time, starting left to right, until all 5 guests have been revealed.
One more thing. Once you have played a card face down, you are not allowed to look at it until the end of round! So remember your colours and any effect cards played to know what your strategy for victory is.
Score up and move your party hat to the number of points you achieved. Now deal out another 6 cards and play 2 more rounds! The player with the highest score at the end of 3 rounds on the scoreboard is declared party planner of the century! Or winner of the game, if you’d prefer.
Scoring
There are multiple ways to gain points at rounds end. Firstly, the large number in the bottom left corner of the card is its base points. Add these together.
Secondly, check the Party Guest card likes and dislikes. If any of the likes match that in the party scenario attributes, this is +1 point for each. However, if any of the guests dislikes match the party scenario attribute, these count as -1 each.
For each party guest that matches the party theme card colour in your party area, +1 point!
Now for bonus points! This can be achieved by matching colours.
– 5 extra points if you have one of each coloured party type in your party area.
– 3 extra points if there are 3 cards of matching Party Guest Cards in your party area.
– 5 extra points if there are 4 matching Party Guest Cards in your party area
– 10 extra points if there are 5 matching Party Guest cards in your party area
The Cards
Looking at the party guest cards you’ll see a super cute anthropomorphised creature art and their name (Illuminati Jeff being one of my preferred cards).
Next you’ll spot each card has one or more of 4 colours, this represents a party theme and will be used during scoring. Blue for a political party, Yellow is a family friendly party, Purple being a costume party and Red represents a raid party.
Some cards have two or four colours along the bar at the top. These cards give you the option to choose what party theme they match, however you have to make the decision on their reveal and it cannot be changed after this. This is where remembering what cards you’ve played is important as you may end up missing out on valuable points if you choose wrong.
Some cards don’t have any affiliation to the 4 colours mentioned, and are an effect card that triggers when revealed at the end of the round. There are 6 variations of these cards.
Party Planner
This card can really ruin your opponent’s day! The Party Planner changes whatever colour is on your Party Theme card to any other colour of your choosing! This card shines when the cards you are being handed don’t work in the favour of the current event drawn. Having a lot of Family Friendly cards passed to you? Boom! The Party Planner can reorganise the event to be a Family Friendly event!
Influencer
This card allows you to make all your party guests like a certain attribute. Best use of this Party Guest Effect Card is to make all your party guests like an attribute on the Party Theme card. This could potentially give you 4 extra points.
Hypnotist
This Party Guest Effect card allows you to force your opponents to lose points. This card’s effect changes all likes to dislikes and all dislikes to likes. If you play this early on, you can set the rest of your invites attributes to switch, whilst ruining your opponents strategy. Gaining you extra points in the process.
Last Minute Invite
I said earlier your banned pile may come into play. Well this is it! Did you have a second good card in your hand that you didn’t want your opponents playing? Ban them! Not only does this stop your opponents bagging those points, but it also gives you the opportunity to invite them as a Last Minute Invite! However this can also be used to complete the collection you were going for. Need a raid card to complete that combo? Last Minute Invite!
Garbage Collector
This guy plays very similarly to Last Minute Invite, but with a bit more flare! Potentially thwart your opponents by choosing one of their banned guest piles, select a card to add to your own party area and place the rest of the banned pile into the discard pile, whilst staring your opponent dead in the eyes. If they later reveal a Last Minute Invite card, tough! Side note, the card specifies to place the new addition face down and immediately reveal it.
Killer Clown
Some parties get sabotaged, hopefully not very often by a stabbing clown. That said, on revealing, the player who invited the killer clown chooses one party guest from each other player’s party area to send into the discard pile. This can ruin collecting those extra points. Ouch!
And that should be all you need to know for starting up your game of Wrong Party!
Zatu Score
You might like
- The very cute art
- How easy it is to set up and play
- Scoring some nice combos
- A lot of fun in a small box
Might not like
- Opponents stealing your cards
- Some elements of luck
- Being beaten by your kids