In a Pickle

In a Pickle is something you can get easily into, in Gamewright's party-like, family-worthy card game from for 4-6 players, especially. Especially players who like to play with words, and, amongst those, the ones who care more about fun than about winning.

You get cards, many cards, 320 many. Every card has a word on it. Every word is a noun. So you give each player a handful of nouns, and you take 4 nouns, place them in the middle of the table, head to head, in a plus sign, arrows out.

Arrows. Arrows help you remember the direction of the "fit-into" - for that is the key criteria by which one evaluates one's options - something that fits into something else. In the direction of the arrows. So like, if you had CHICKEN on one of the cards and someone overlaps BALLOON upon CHICKEN, one might be reasonably implying that a CHICKEN can fit into a BALLOON. Similar things could be said about underlapping WHISTLE with CHICKEN because a WHISTLE can fit into a CHICKEN, much to the chagrin of the aforementioned.

The fun makes itself especially apparent during "Pickle Rounds" which are initiated as soon as one of the arms of the plus (the array of cards, face up, on the table) reaches 4. After that, players may ONLY play cards on that arm, the last player to successfully add a card winning all the cards in that arm. O, both goodie and glee! All the cards in an arm!!

The success of this game depends a lot on the light-heartedness of the players, in the first place. But if you're a small group of friends, or an actually healthy family, and you enjoy arguing (who doesn't?) you'll probably find it Major FUN