Designed by: Dan Penn,Rich Coombes
Herd Mentality is a party game for as many players as you like (the box suggests 20 as a maximum, but this could get a little chaotic) where players are trying to guess the most popular answer to a series of random questions.
One player is assigned the role of asking the questions and reads them out to all players. The questions don’t have a factually definitive answer but are things like “What’s the first thing you do when you wake up” or “How many burgers can a human eat in 20 minutes” or “What’s the best flavour of ice cream?”. Everyone – including the questioner – writes down their answer before they are all revealed. Each player who wrote the most popular answer gets a point, and if any one person was the only player to give their answer, they take the pink cow piece until another player suffers a similar fate and takes the cow from them. While you have the pink cow, you cannot win!
Assuming they’re free of the cow, the first player to reach 8 points wins.
None.
None! Unless someone is taking a very long time over their answers, a situation Herd Mentality seems engineered to avoid.
The rules are super-super-simple. The burning is minimal, and more about anticipating the thoughts of those around you.
There's a reasonable amount of two-sided cards in the deck. After a few plays you'll encounter questions you've had before, so the replay value isn't infinite. But if you're playing with different players there is, of course, no guarantees of the same answers being given.
4-8
Players
8+
Years
5-15
Mins
Sam says
A fun, oddball game where there are two layers of activity: the game itself (-answer the question honestly) and the meta-game (-answer the question to try and match other player's answers, particularly with less players). The latter can lead to really funny situations where players cancel each other out. The addition of the cow is a nice twist: it doesn't often happen but I have seen it prevent the points leader from winning. Like a reverse Just One (which challenges everyone to come up with non-matching words) Herd Mentality is a game that prompts laughter, and that's always a valuable commodity.