LogFAQs > #898980844

1. Time's Up! Title Recall
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36553/times-title-recall

Genre/mechanics: Team vs team, clue-giving, trivia, restricted communication, memory, party game
Rules complexity: 2/10
Game length: 30-40 minutes
Player count: 3-8
Experience: 50+ games with 4-8
First played: 2016

Time's Up is a twist on classic clue-giving party games like Taboo and Charades, played on teams using one deck of cards. When it is your turn, you draw a card - which has a title on it - and get your partner(s) to guess what's on it and score the card. You go through as many as you can in the time limit, and then the unguessed clue(s) go back into the deck. Then the deck passes to the next player. Once the deck is drained, the cards are scored and re-shuffled for further rounds (a total of three), where clue-giving is restricted to one word and then acting-only.

Design - So in terms of explaining the hint - Time's Up is in no way a "designer game." It's a combination of two classic "parlor games" and it's in fact been a parlor game called Celebrities, where the deck is constructed out of people writing on cards, and every entry is a person's name. ("Time's Up!" is also filled with celebrities, whereas "Time's Up! Title Recall" is filled with titles of books, TV shows, movies, games, and the like.) If you've heard of Monikers, that's also the same thing, though Monikers's cards are more diverse/modern and have short blurbs printed on them (along with a ruleset that I find less satisfying).

Back to the design of the game - games like Taboo are inherently fun because you get to watch people struggle to communicate certain words, and then be baffled by how effectively they can communicate others. The time limit throws that challenge into a pressure cooker. Time's Up gives you all of that, and it also gives you opportunities to get the other team back for their easy clues, due to the second and third rounds. There can also be a lot of frustration to a game of Charades, since acting out a bunch of words can be quite difficult - but when you've already seen the cards, the memory element means you only need to evoke a bit of that card before your partner may be able to pick up on it.

Four is by far the best player count for Time's Up, but six (with either two teams of three, or three teams of two) is also very good. Five (asymmetric teams) can work, as can three (no teams, but your score is a sum of your clue-giving and guessing scores). You can play with bigger teams than that, but the downtime between personally seeing the cards and the agency in guessing will drop a lot.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness