My Favourite Things

My Favourite Things is, to put it mildly, a curiosity. It takes the traditional deck-of-cards mechanic of trick-taking (-everyone plays one card; the most powerful card wins the ‘trick’) but grafts it onto a pretty bonkers party game, where the idea of scoring, winning or losing become secondary to the silliness.

Each player is assigned their own six coloured cards: these are numbered 1-5, plus a Heartbreaker card. The game takes place over two rounds: in the first round, you choose a category for the player on your left and hand them your cards. Let’s pluck an example out of the air and say the category is birds. The player on your left must now write down five birds on the cards numbered 1-5 in order of preference (one being the favourite) and write a bird they really dislike on the heartbreaker card. It doesn’t have to be as broad a category as birds though: it could be anything at all: songs, friends from a period of the past, items of clothing, noises, pets, chemical symbols: whatever.

At the same time, you’ll be doing a similar job with whatever category the player to your right handed you, and so on around the table. When everyone has finished writing their cards, they’re handed back to the owners – but crucially, the numbers are now hidden (the game comes with sleeves and cards to facilitate this).

Now a trick-taking game starts, with players playing a single card to each trick and the winner getting a Heart token as a point. 5s are the weakest number, and 1s are the strongest, but a Heartbreaker will win any trick with a 1 in it! If there are ties, the earlier-played card will win. You play five tricks this way, with the last card in each hand not played, then a new round begins with all the words wiped off, new categories assigned and the cards passed to the player on your right. As before, once everyone’s finished filling the cards in, they are handed back to their owner and the tricks are played. At the end of the second round, the player with the most heart tokens is the winner!