Alibis is one of these. Players cooperate as investigators trying to identify the culprit responsible for a crime. Mug shots of the suspects are arrayed in the center of the table, and a word card is dealt onto each one. Then each player is dealt two cards with numbers indicating two of those suspects. Each player's job is to write down a one word clue that connects the two words on their suspects.
Once everyone is ready, clues are revealed and players use a dry erase board to indicate which two suspects/words they think each of their fellow players is pointing to. By process of elimination, ONE suspect will have no clue -- the actual perpetrator of the crime. To tally up a round, you remove chips from a pool of score tokens: 1 token for each player who had any number of fellow players guess their two words correctly, plus 3 tokens for each player who successfully identifies the perpetrator. Your goal is to try to empty this pool of tokens (or come as close as you can) over the course of three rounds.
Codenames was such a runaway hit, it might be heresy to claim it had any "problems" in the design that needed to be "solved." And yet, my gamer group has long since moved on from it, for reasons more than just "new games coming along" to crowd it off the table. In no particular order:
- Because of the two team format, it doesn't do a good job accommodating an odd number of players.
- The game comes with a timer because it really does need one, and yet it feels cruel to actually use it. Coming up with good clues is hard, and everyone just kind of has to sit there and wait while you do it. But if you actually limit the time, clue givers can easily come up with nothing at all.
- Since only two players can give clues at a time, you sometimes get tired of playing the game as a group before everyone who might want to give clues gets a chance to do so.
- Loud voices on the clue guessing side can drive that process to the exclusion of others on a team.
Alibis addresses all of that. Making the game fully cooperative allows everyone to be active at the same time -- and in particular, lets them come up with clues at the same time. Not only does everyone get to participate in clue giving, but you don't feel the time spent doing that as keenly when everyone is doing it at once. Even if one or two players do take longer to concoct their clues, they're helping your team (because you're all one team), and you're more comfortable waiting for that.
On the guessing side, everyone must make their own decisions in secret, so no one can quarterback that part of the game. And the pressure to be right is reduced, since the most you can score is 1 point no matter how many people guess a clue right. The big scoring comes in guessing the culprit, which you can occasionally find your way to even if you don't pair all the right words with the right players along the way.
Alibis takes 2 to 6 players -- and while it's best with more, it works fine at any number (including odd numbers). To set up the suspects and words in a round, you simply double the number of players and add one (the one ultimately becoming the perpetrator). Plus, the game follows in a long line of "chase the best score possible" co-op games (like Hanabi, Just One, or The Mind) where coming this close spurs you to want to play again.
I will confess that Alibis hasn't caught fire in my group the way Codenames once did. Still, it's super fast to set up and explain, so I expect it will make appearances on game nights with larger groups in the coming months. I give Alibis a B+. It manages to be new and a bit nostalgic at the same time, and scratches an itch I didn't know I had.
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