Last Word and Faces - two more significantly playworthy party games

Buffalo Games, makers of the Major Fun Award-winning IMAgiNiff have come out with two new, note- and playworthy party games: Last Word and Faces.


Last Word might remind you of the kind of fun you get playing A to Z, but the game play is different enough to be worthy of any good party game collection. There's a deck of "Subject Cards" (e.g.: "Things Used by an Artist," "U. S. Cities," "All About Love"), and a deck of letter cards. When the letter and subject are revealed, an electronic timer is started (it's a random timer, so you never really know when it's going to go off, and when it does, it sounds like an air horn). Players say any word they think of that starts with the chosen letter and fits the selected category. The winning player is not, however, the one who is necessarily the cleverest or most informed, but the player who calls out the correct answer just before the timer sounds. Me, I happen to love games that ask me to be noisy, and I found having to balance my genius at trivia with my luck in timing added significnantly to my involvement and delight.

Faces is an Apples to Apples-type game, which is good and bad. The bad part of it is that it suffers from the comparison, the good part is that that is what makes it so party-appropriate. The main play element of the game is a deck of cards with vintage (turn of the 20th-century) images of men and women, and animals. Another deck provides characteristics, such as "the one who makes Christmas extra special" or "the one about to break some bad news." To play, six character cards are drawn from one of the decks, one of four pre-selected characteristic card is chosen and read, and players vote to guess which one the current player (the judge) might choose. A race track board is used to keep score. Every turn is followed by much discussion about who picked what why, which is what makes the game so party-worthy.