Medium is a word game that tests your ability to think like a fellow player. On your turn, you and the player to your left each select one of six cards from your hands, each card showing a word. You reveal your choices, and then you must both try to think of a new word that connects your two cards. Something that's a "medium" between the two, if you will. Then, on the count of three, each of you says aloud the connection you were thinking. If you've read each other's mind -- like a "medium," if you will -- then you'll speak the same thing at the same time, and score! If you each say something different, though, you now have another chance to try to connect those two words instead... and a third and final chance to connect again if you fail on the second try.
That's the core of the gameplay, and there's no denying that it can generate a fun rush of a moment. It's a simple thrill, but a thrill nonetheless: when you and a partner speak in unison, it feels great! There's cheering and high-fiving. Sometimes there are stunned expressions from other players who can't believe you matched.
But unfortunately, there's a lot about the game that gets in the way of enjoying that fun at the core. First is down time. The game purports to take up to 8 players, but you only get to play twice each round: once each with the players on either side of you. If you actually play it with 8 players (and we did), you spend three times as much time sitting there, waiting for your turn, as you do actively participating. Most of our party favorites do a much better job involving everyone more of the time.
There are weird bits of unnecessary excess injected in the game design. Scoring is done with pools of tokens -- tokens worth a random 5 or 6 for when you get it right on the first guess, worth 3 or 4 for the second guess, and 1 or 2 for the third. In practice, this 1-point variance at each "level" doesn't really serve to help trailing teams feel like they can come from behind -- 1 point this way or that rarely makes the difference. It just feels like unnecessary complication.
The end of the game is triggered by an unnecessarily "gamery" kind of mechanism. Three cards are shuffled into the bottom third of the game deck. When you draw the third of these, the game ends after the current round. The uncertainty this adds -- is this round the last one, or will there be one more? -- really doesn't add much in the context of a party game. You can't "change your strategy" relative to the unknown end condition. Other party games are fine just using a fixed number of rounds, and this one would have been too.
Then there's one component that the game doesn't come with, but desperately needs: a timer. The problem of down time between your turns in a party game is compounded when there's no limit to how long those turns can take. We began play by simply allowing partners to take all the time they needed to come up with a word to say... and the experience was not very fun. Once we implemented a 15-second timer on each pair of words to step up the pace, things improved substantially.
As packaged, I'd say Medium is maybe a C- game, a neat idea lost in some unhelpful trappings. Limit the player count to 4, and I think it jumps to a C+. Throw in the timer while limiting the player count, and it might get all the way to a B. Yet it's still not exactly what you're looking for in a party game. I think it's better characterized as some light filler to close down an evening of weightier fare.
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