Designed by: Jun Sasaki
Mr. Face is a game of making faces out of card, and guessing what they mean.
In the box is a deck of cards that describe a particular moment or mood, and a bunch of pieces to make both the face and the expression on it. Each player gets a hand of cards, and whoever’s turn it is, that player chooses a card (for instance I’m so tired or I wasn’t expecting that! or Who’s that guy?!?) and constructs a facial expression on the table. According to the rules, they have a hundred seconds to do so, but you can lengthen or shorten this depending on how you feel about the game. We’ve found a minute is plenty.
Once the face is made, everyone else selects a card from their hand that could feasibly match the face displayed, and hand it to the active player. These are shuffled in with the real card (plus more from the deck if you have less than six players) to form six possible ‘answers’ to the face being pulled. Then everyone guesses which card is the real one, with points scored for guessing right, and points to the active player for each correct guess (it’s not in the rules, but we also award a point for someone guessing your fake card!) Cards are used to record points – keep them separate from your hand to avoid confusion!
Then the next player takes a turn making the face, and so on until everyone has had an equal number of face-making turns: how many is up to you, really – at which point the player with the most points wins.
None
Moderate. It's not a long game, but children wanting it to be their turn will have to be patient.
Minimal at most!
It really hugely depends. The only variation in play is the faces made - and that's fun. But the game around it can feel quite samey quite quickly after the first couple of plays.
3-6
Players
6+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
What's really lovely about Mr. Face is how simple it is, and the millions of expressions you can get from a fairly small number of cardboard components. It's a brilliant game for young kids because the visual and tactile aspects are so pleasing. For adults though the novelty feels like it wears off fairly quickly: making the face is fun, but the attendant game isn't actually as engaging as the activity it's built on. Our house-version of awarding points to you if someone guessed your card (when you're not the active player) does make everyone feel more involved on each turn, but there's a downside of looking at your cards and feeling like you're not going to fool anyone: they might be a hand of gloomy cards and someone has made an ecstatic face! Either way, there's a fair amount of waiting between turns (fine for some; less so for others) and although the first visit is certainly a lot of fun, Mr. Face doesn't feel like it'll stand up to repeated play particularly well. Generally I'm a big fan of Oink games, but this one was a narrow miss.