Wrong Party

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.