[In the Lab] Stupor Market: The Fud Spilling Game

Here's a new game in the lab. This game was inspired by the "wurds" meme, in which pictures of food are paired with intentionally garbled phonetic spellings.

This meme always puts my wife Megan into fitful hysterics. (Okay, it has that effect on me, too.) I wanted to make a party game all about misspelling foods. I gathered elements of Balderdash, Dixit, Taboo, Last Word and Origins of Words.

Don't know if it'll go anywhere, but I thought it worthwhile to share our notes. This is definitely a light family game, but I could easily see it working well after a few drinks among friends.


Stuff You Need
3-6 players.

A deck of food cards. Each card shows a food and its real name. There are 52 food cards in a deck.

A randomized timer. (If one is not available, roll three six-sided dice, add the results together, and set a stopwatch to count down that many seconds.)

A pencil and paper for each player.


How to Play
All players do these steps together at the same time.

1. Draw a card from the deck and keep it secret from the other players.

2. On a piece of paper, write the name of the food on that card as cryptically and phonetically as you can. For example, "lettuce" could be "laydus."

3. Place the card and the paper face down in front of you.

4. Flip over your paper, so the rest of the group can now read your misspelled food.

5. Start the timer.

6. Look at the other player's misspelled foods and decipher what they actually are. Write down your guesses on the paper as fast as you can.

7. When the timer runs out, put your pencils down.

8. First, you score one point for each player who guessed your food correctly. There is an exception. If the whole group guessed your food correctly, you do not score any points.

9. Next, you score one point for every food you guessed correctly.

This ends the round.


Victory
After three rounds, the player with the most points wins the game.


Notes
The two separate phases of scoring are a nice buffer for different skills. Even if you're bad at misspelling food, you can make up for it if you're a good guesser. If you're a bad guesser, you can make up for it if you're a good misspelled.

The commercial potential for this kind of game is very heavily dependent on the components. I can see a nice package containing the food cards, a supermarket-themed score tracker, a set of grocery cart pawns, perhaps a notepad, and golf pencils all going for $25.

Much like Apples to Apples, it would be easy to produce a deck of cards with stock images of fruits, vegetables, and other categories of "fud." Expansions would be a snap.