Just One

25th June 2019.

Tuesday night gaming beckons at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking.

The evening was kicked off by the word game 'Just One'.

Just One is probably the best cross-over game ever. This is a co-operative party games that anyone can learn and easily play.

What's in a game?

​​The game comes with the following components.

• Deck of cards with 5 words written on one side on all of them.
• Plastic name/card display stands.
• Dry wipe pens and (With dry wipe erasers.).

That's it, all these components are plain and purely functional. It's like someone made a game out of the crap left over at then of a conference or something similar - well except for the deck of cards!

How's it play?

Firstly the deck of cards is shuffled and 13 cards are dealt face-down into it's own separate draw deck. The remaining cards can be placed back in the box, they are not needed for the game.

• A name/card stand and a dry-wipe pen/eraser is given to each player
• The 'active' player draws a card from the 13 cards and (Without looking at it!) places their card stand with the 5 names facing away.
• The active player then chooses a number from 1 to 5.The 5 names on the card each correspond to the numbers 1 to 5. Thus if the active selects '2', then word 2 on the card becomes the 'selected' word.
• The other players must use their dry-wipe pens to write clues on their on their own card stands to help the active player guess the word.
• However, the other players can only write one word as a clue - as the name suggests 'Just One'!
• The clue must be written in secret from ALL other players. When all the other players have written down a single-word clue each. Then the clues are compared to all other player's clues (All clues must not be shown to the active player.).
• Any doubles are all removed from the round.

So if the word is 'Cat' and the clues are 'Sylvester' 'Meow' and 'Whiskers', then all 3 clues are permissible.
If the clues were 'Sylvester', 'Sylvester' and 'Whiskers'. Both iterations of 'Sylvester' would be erased and removed from the round and only 'Whiskers' would be left.

• After any eliminations are dealt with, the remaining cards are shown to the active player. The active player should try to guess what the selected word is from the available clues.
• The active player can choose to make a guess or pass.
• If the active player chooses to pass. The card is placed into discard pile.
• If the active player makes a guess... and gets it wrong: Then the card is placed into the discard pile and another card is drawn from the draw deck and is ALSO discarded in the discard pile.
• If the active player makes a guess... and gets it right: Then the card is placed into the scoring pile.
• The player to the left of the active players becomes the next active player
• Play continues until there are no cards left.
• All the cards in the scoring pile are tallied up a collective score is generated. The higher, the better. 

Overall

My only gripe about this game, is in the selection of words. Some types of words are a lot easier to get clues for.

Example
'Cat' for example is easy, I can think of lots of possible clues.
'Panther' on the other hand is a lot harder to think of clues for. I think of 'Black', but that's about it.

Just One also has a little more nuance to it than what you would expect.
The rule about removing duplicate clues is what makes the game in my opinion. Going for an obvious clue risks having 2 or more clues removed from the game! But going for something too obscure risks muddling the clue.

But overall all, Just One is party game that's for up to 7 players, that is also co-operative and is easy to learn.

What's not to like?