Designed by: Antonin Boccara
Fiesta de los Muertos is a party game of trying to link seemingly random words to famous characters, real or fictional. How do the words link? The players themselves decide.
How the game works is not immediately intuitive so we’ll run through the process here. Each player is dealt a name card with a famous person – eg William Shakespeare – on that they look at secretly. They write the name on their skull card with the pens supplied, and then fold the top over so the name is hidden from everyone. Below the fold, they now write a single word that clues the name. For Shakespeare, someone might write ‘bard’. Then all the skulls are surreptitiously passed clockwise, with the name still hidden. The players receiving the new skulls rub out the clue, and write a new clue that relates to the word they can see. So, in our Shakespeare example, we receive a card saying ‘bard’, rub it out and write ‘singer’.
This passing and re-clueing happens twice more, then all the skulls are laid out for everyone to see with their fourth-generation clues visible. The original name cards are flipped over, revealing the names, along with a random card shuffled in from the deck, and now all players – separately! – write down their guesses as to which clue links back to which name. For instance, if we spot the clue ‘choir’ we might be able to work backwards choir>(something about music)>singer (the clue we wrote)>bard (the clue we saw), connect ‘bard’ with Shakespeare and realise that that skull has Shakespeare hidden beneath it.
Sometimes the connections are obvious, but often they are less so and sometimes they’re completely screwy! Although players guess separately, they score as a group, and the goal is to ‘appease the spirits’ of the names in question, which is done by a number of correct guesses for each one.
None
None!
The rules, although a little weird-feeling on first play, are actually very straightforward. The brain-burning is the logical, lateral and narrative thinking required to get not from B to A, but E to A!
There's a big deck of cards but the built-in variety here comes as much from the player input as the game itself
4-8
Players
10+
Years
5-15
Mins
Sam says
I couldn't play Fiesta de los Muertos all night, but I do enjoy this type of game where the components in the box feel like a framework for player input; generating a silly paradigm-clashing experience that highlights how our brains often work differently but occasionally - triumphantly - in synch. Some of the linked games on the right are my favourites and if Fiesta de los Muertos doesn't quite oust them it very much deserves its place in the room. If I have a caveat it's player-count: the more players there are the less words you see, so the end-game guessing can end up feeling a little arbitrary.