It's a Trap!

It's easy to conflate the idea of being a "serious gamer" with the enjoyment of elaborate games with complex rules. But those two ideas don't necessarily go hand in hand. To some extent, a "serious gamer" is born the day a board game lover realizes that Monopoly, Risk, The Game of Life, and the like simply aren't very good games.

The truth is, there are plenty of great games that are fairly streamlined. Many are in the "party game" space, a genre my group of friends explores regularly. A recent favorite we found is the cooperative clue-giving game Just One. Around the same time, we found a similar but far more complex game called Trapwords. And though it's by no means a bad game, it does serve as example that more complex isn't necessarily better.

Trapwords takes a core of clue-giving gameplay and presents it in a fantasy dungeon crawl wrapper. Players divide into two teams, each representing a party of adventurers trying to progress through a dungeon to beat the boss monster inside. The real challenge is to avoid all the traps along the way -- traps laid by your rival adventurers.

Teams take turns trying to guess a word on a clue card. (Half the words are everyday, while the other half are all fantasy-themed, allowing you to nominally stay inside the metaphor of the game.) Before the one-minute timer starts on one player trying to get their teammates to guess the word, the other team gets to see what the word is. They set a number of "Trapwords" -- taboo words which the clue giver can't say. And the clue giver doesn't get to know ahead of time what the trapwords are. They have to tiptoe through their allotted time, trying to avoid the words they think have been forbidden. Who can outthink whom?

The boss monster at the end of the dungeon (aka, the final round) is randomly selected from a deck at the start of the game. Different monsters have different abilities that put some additional restriction on the team trying to win the game.

The game is fun enough. It's like Taboo, except that instead of some game designers you'll never meet trying to make it hard for you, it's your own friends on the opposing team doing it. The thought process works a lot like Just One, despite that game being cooperative. Ultimately, you're trying to get into the heads of the other players. You want to think of clues no one else will think of -- here, as clue giver, to skirt around the Trapwords likely chosen for you.

But the game hardly needs all the window-dressing. The dungeon crawl flavor doesn't add much. The final round rule given by the boss monster feels like at least one complication too many. Take Decrypto as a contrasting example. The story there is that you're a spy trying to slip secret messages by a rival trying to intercept them. That's as far as the story goes, and as far as it really needs to go.

I would play Trapwords again if it were suggested. But it also feels like that suggestion isn't likely to come in my group, not with other options around (and, in particular, the two I mentioned by name in this very post). I'd give it a B. Perhaps it would be a bigger hit with a group that really wants more complexity, even in their party games? That's not really us.