Ito

Ito is a co-operative party game where players have to place numbers in order. It sounds easy, but maybe you think a potato and a sweet potato are pretty much the same. Or maybe you think they are wildly different. They’re both vegetables, after all.

A single game of Ito takes moments. The goal of the game is to arrange a series of numbers in ascending order on the table – but each card comes from a separate player, they must be arranged face-down, and players can only communicate an idea – literally – of what number they were dealt.

At the start of each game a Category card is drawn and read out to all players, each of which has a spectrum of numeric answers of on a scale of 1-100. It might be things you could stare at all day, or famous cartoons, or important life events. In each case, every player gets a random card between 1-100 and must try to think of an answer to the category that best represents that number. Let’s say I have a low card, like the 11. I’m not going to say a beautiful valley for something I could stare at all day, so maybe I say something like a tin of beans: I have no desire to stare at a tin of beans in the first place; it seems incredibly boring to do so all day, but it’s not actively unpleasant so perhaps the 11 is okay. For the famous cartoon category I’d guess a high number would be Mickey Mouse or The Simpsons but for my 11 perhaps I’d dredge up something from my childhood. Important life events is even more subjective but maybe I’d say something fairly innocuous, like getting my National Insurance card.

And while I’m doing this all the other players are doing the same for their numbers as well, so hopefully when we compare our things that we’re happy to stare at all day and organise them in order of preference, we’ll also be organising the numbers correctly too. We can discuss as much as we’d like regarding the order, and then once we’ve agreed – or compromised – we flip the cards over, hoping that we successfully synergised our thinking!

That’s the entire game. We’ve tended to play multiple games in one session though, so everyone gets a turn choosing a category. For what it’s worth, we’ve also found writing the answers down works much better than trying to remember them all.