Team3 - First Play!

4th March 2022

It's a Friday and I'm in Farnborough with some workmates for some evening games.

The first game of the night is essentially 3 Wise Monkeys: The Game, known as Team3, although I'm not certain any of us are particularly wise?

---

What's in a game?

• ​Blocks: Team3 comes with 2 sets of 5 chunky plastic blocks shaped like tetrominoes. These blocks are used to construct the shapes shown on blueprint cards.
• Cards: The game has a 2 sets of square cards:
  Role cards: There are 3 role cards in the game, The Architect, The Supervisor and The Builder. Each role is illustrated by one of the three wise monkeys.
  Blueprint cards: There are 70 blueprint cards and each one displays a shape configured from the tetrominoes. The blueprint cards are divided into 3 decks labelled with 1, 2 or 3 stars which represent easy, medium and hard difficulties.
  Finally, each blueprint has a that shows the cards orientation.
• Plastic standee: A little plastic stand to hold a blueprint card.

There's not much to say about what few components there are to the game.
The blocks are made of sturdy colourfulplastic and feel very tactile, handling and playing them feels quite satisfying. Otherwise, the cards are pretty standard quality.

The game's art is monochrome and only appears on the role cards. The 3 illustrations are slightly cartoony looking but also fairly good.

Other than the images on the blueprint cards, there's no other iconography in the game.

---

---

How's it play?
Team3 can be played cooperatively as a team if 3 or competitively as 2 teams of 3. The 2 play styles are practically identical, the only real difference being how the blocks are allocated.
For the purposes of this blog, I'm going to describe the competitive game and point out how the cooperative game is different.

Setup

• Teams: Divide the players into 2 teams of 3.
  Cooperative: There is only 1 team of 3 in cooperative.
  Roles: Choose or randomly assign a role to each player. The 2 people playing architects should sit next to each to each other.
• Blocks: Give 1 set of blocks each to the builders.
• Blueprints: Sort the blueprint cards into their relevant types and shuffled them into face-down decks.
• Draw card: For the competitive 2 team game, only the 1-star cards used.
  Draw a card and place it on standee, position it so that only the architect players can view the diagram.
  Cooperative: In the cooperative game, the team decide which difficulty of blueprint to yse.

No the teams are ready to go.

On to play
Both teams play simultaneously and have the objective of putting together their blocks in the shape/configuration shown on the card which was drawn. However, there are some complications to this...

• The Architect: The only player on a team that can see the blueprint card is the architect.
  The architect must describe the configuration to the supervisor but without using words or sounds! The architect can speak no evil and can only use gestures to explain what needs doing. The only time the architect can speak is to confirm their team has completed the shape.
• The Supervisor: Since the supervisor cannot be spoken to, they hear no evil. Using the information provided by the architect, the supervisor in turn, must tell the builder how to put the blocks together verbally.
• The Builder: The builder can see no evil and therefore must keep their eyes closed for the entirety of the game! The builder must actually put together the blocks by following the verbal instructions from the supervisor.
• Point: Whichever team puts their blocks together to match the blueprint first wins a point!

Endgame
The team that reaches 6 points first, wins. Although this limit is fairly arbitrary and players can choose whatever score limit they want.

Cooperative
In the cooperative game, the team gets 3 minutes to complete a blueprint, if they take longer, they fail.
3 minutes might seem a lot, but the 2 and 3 star difficulties get much more complex.

---

A completed blueprint.

---

Overall
There's little strategy that can be adopted when playing Team3, that's not a criticism though, Team3 is sort of a hyped version of charades that's all about communication and interpretation between teammates. As with actual charades, players will probably very quickly adopt some standard gestures to represent certain things.
It's also worth adding that the game comes in 2 versions Green and Pink, which can be combined to support up to 4 teams of 3 players.

There's not much more to say about the Team3 really. It's a light party game that is easy to learn and will have a lot of crossover appeal, it's not something to be taken seriously. If you looking for deep gameplay, look elsewhere.
With the right people though, Team3 can be a fun diversion or a good filler game.