Designed by: Inka Brand,Markus Brand
Word Slam is a fast-paced guessing game, where each round sees two teams compete to be the first to guess a word. At the end of the tenth round, the team who guessed most words wins.
Players divide into two teams of at least two people (there are also rules in the box for playing with three), and each team sets up card racks of their colour. They also take the stack of 105 clue cards in their colour, and divide them by colour into piles of nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions. Ten word cards are dealt face down to the middle of the table, one for each round of the game – the word cards each contain six words. The teams designate a wordmaster each for the first round, and the wordmasters roll a dice to secretly see which of the six words on the first card will be the answer for round one. One says ‘Word!’ the other says “Slam!”, and the round begins.
The wordmasters cannot communicate with their teams verbally, they can only do so by placing clue cards on the racks, which they do whilst frantically sifting through the piles for relevant words. So for instance, if the word is ‘banana’, the wordmaster might search the adjectives to find ‘yellow’, and the verbs to find ‘eat’. Perhaps ‘circle’ and ‘divided’ will help. Team mates shout out possible answers, charades-style.
Once one team guesses correctly, they take that word card for their score pile, new wordmasters are assigned and a new round begins.After ten rounds, the team with the highest score wins.
Word Slam is a neat take on the age-old game of charades, except that instead of using your body as a tool, you have a few handfuls of generic words to work with. The fact that two teams are competing simultaneously for the same word adds immensely to the fun, because you can listen out for clues from the other team, and sow red herrings of your own to throw them off. If you like word games, and party games, Word Slam is definitely worth a try.
This has been a big hit for fiends and family with me. It's exrtremely accessible, and guessing and cluing are equally fun in different ways. It's fast and frantic, and trying to throw off the other team by shouting spurious clues is a strategy I particularly enjoy. Some of the black words are genuinely impossible-seeming, but someone seems to always get there in the end. It may have taken us about 8 minutes to guess 'lactose-intolerant', but boy did we feel good about it when we did.
It's team against team, so unlikely to get too personal.
There's no sitting around waiting your turn, it's fast and frantic.
Some of the more complicated words or concepts could fox younger players, but you can choose to play with the simpler cards.
There's tons of replayability here, since each word card has 6 options, and there are several hundred cards.
3-8
Players
8+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Word Slam is great. I'm often a bit suspicious of 'party' games as if they hang on a single, allegedly hilarious USP, after a fun first play they can pall pretty quickly. What makes Word Slam work - against the odds, as trying to describe some of the words seems impossible - is the interaction between the teams. As well as guessing your own word, you're also earwigging their guesses at the same time in case something gives you that breakthrough moment, as has happened to us several times. Like (the more cerebral) Codenames, Word Slam has taken very simple ingredients and made something great with them.