Base price: $24.
3 – 6 players; includes two-player variant.
play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 5
Full disclosure: A review copy of Things in Rings was provided by Allplay.
Survived Gen Con! Didn’t get sick or COVID-sick, so, score one for largely being masked the entire time. Strong recommendation for cons, though I lost my voice because I was trying to be too loud. I got one of those little voice amplifiers, recently, and it seems to work pretty well, so I’m hoping I can just do that in the future so I don’t lose my voice again. This was also the first Gen Con in years that I actually had time to play a couple games, also, so that was wild. One of the games I got a chance to play was Things in Rings, new from Allplay! Let’s learn more about it.
Things in Rings is all about Venn diagrams. I’d link to the funny video of Kamala Harris talking about her love of Venn diagrams, since it’s really topical here, but I can’t find one that isn’t from something like “GOP War Room” and, frankly, if you’re making fun of someone for saying that they love Venn diagrams, this game isn’t gonna be for you. Regardless, there are a lot of Venn diagrams in your future and you need to figure out what the criteria for each is gonna be. One player, the Knower, holds all the answers, but they’re not being particularly helpful. Can you be the first to play all of your cards?
Contents
Setup
First off, decide how many rings you want:
If you’re using one ring, just make a ring. Two rings should have an overlap between them, and three rings should each overlap the other two rings and have a central overlap where all three meet. The rings have criteria cards with their own difficulty levels:
Shuffle the Things cards and deal each player 5:
You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
Gameplay here is pretty straightforward, even if it doesn’t necessarily give you the strict “winner / loser” clean gameplay thing. More on that later. To start, the Knower places three cards from their hand where they belong within the rings.
Over a given round, your goal is to play all your cards! That part’s pretty easy. On your turn, play a card from your hand to one of the sections that you think it belongs in. You can play to the overlapping sections. You can also play to the outside of the rings and say “I don’t think this belongs in any of these rings” to play None.
Regardless of what you pick, the Finder has a job to do! Their goal is to evaluate whether or not you played the card to the correct spot:
- For Word, their criteria generally looks at the structure of the word. How many letters does it have? Where are the vowels? How many syllables? Things like that.
- For Attribute, the criteria generally has something to do with the physical property of the object referred to by the word. How much does it weigh? How big is it? How many holes does it have?
- For Context, the criteria generally has to do with how the object is used in society. Are there stories about it? Do rich people have one? Can you carry it on an airplane?
No matter what, the Finder has to use their own judgment when deciding; you can make fun of them later. If you’re incorrect, they move your card to the correct zone, you draw a replacement card, and your turn ends. If you’re correct, you don’t draw a replacement card and you take another turn!
The first player to empty their hand wins! For an extra challenge, try to guess what the criteria were before they’re revealed!
For cooperative play, have the Knower draw 10 cards instead, and place one card per player (including themselves). After every player has had a turn, the Knower adds another card from their hand to the center. If all Finders run out of cards before the Knower does, all players win!
Player Count Differences
Really, not a lot here. More players really just means there’s more information available between your turns, but that applies for everyone, so it’s just a bit easier for any singular player to win. It’s not bad! It’s just how these kinds of things work. More information is gradually going to be put into the game every turn; you just need to make sure you’re maximizing what you’re getting out of it. Beyond that, there’s no real difference in player count, so I’d happily play this with many or few players. Just make sure you use the co-op mode for 2 players; it’s a bit too straightforward otherwise.
Strategy
As is usually the case for party games, not much to work with, here.
- You don’t have to know the criteria to win. You can have a vague sense of it and get lucky with the cards, after all. You just need to be able to place five cards successfully. Try to keep an eye on what other players are playing and see if you can reason why your cards are similar to or different from the cards in certain spots.
- Keep in mind that a player can win in one turn. There’s really no predictability here, since a player who guesses correctly immediately takes another turn.
- Since “None” isn’t in a ring, it can be easy to forget about it by mistake. None is a perfectly viable and valid option to play! Sometimes, if the Criteria are too specific, you might actually find that most of your cards end up there.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- They really nailed the Dr. Seuss-esque art. Snow Conrad did an incredible job and there’s so much unique art! It looks almost straight out of the books.
- There’s a nice bit of debate and disagreement that results at the end of the game that’s always kinda funny. Not everyone is going to agree with The Knower and that’s fine and almost encouraged! Fight it out, to some degree.
- A rare competitive party game where you don’t necessarily feel like you lost when another player wins, which is nice. I’m always impressed when another player wins. I’m not great at sussing out various conditions, so it’s nice to have another player who’s pretty good at reading the vibes.
- This has the feel of a deduction game combined with a word game, which is great. You’re really trying to figure out what a bunch of things have in common with unclear criteria, and working through that logic puzzle can be pretty fun.
- Feels easy to expand on both sides, with more Things and more Criteria. Wouldn’t recommend more rings, though. More rings would start to get truly unwieldy, though I’m extremely down. Just combine two games and make an absolute nightmare scenario.
- Nicely-sized game; easy to transport. This is a good game box size.
- The extra co-op mode is appreciated, as well. Sometimes you don’t really want to compete, and instead want to be able to chat and figure it out together.
- Very approachable. You really are just trying to figure out where you can place cards in a Venn diagram. That’s kinda the whole game, and it works surprisingly well? No weird scoring, nothing; just a pick-up-and-play kind of game.
Mehs
- Some kind of card organization solution would be nice. Everything fits somewhat well in the box, but with that many cards it’s no simple task to shuffle all the Things, either. Having various ways to better organize all the Criteria cards would make the startup for the game a lot faster.
- I do wish that games that could only be played with two players via a variant would indicate that on the box. It’s an ongoing thing. Things in Rings is a 3 – 6 player game with a two-player variant. This is the conflict between design and product, sometimes, though; a lot of games tend to sell better (especially lately) with two-player play, so a lot of games will slap together some way to play with two so they can put it on the box. Thankfully, this variant works well, so it’s good, but I wish it were still more honest about variants vs. the main game.
Cons
- The rings are appropriately-sized, though you may have to stack cards in some of the overlap spaces. If the rings were larger they’d barely fit on most tables, and the cards are small cards as-is, but especially if the round takes a while you’re going to have a lot of overlap.
- I can imagine that some players will feel weird about being the Knower, since you’re not really “playing” the game in the same way, though I was unbothered. The Knower more facilitates the game than plays, but they still have to make tough calls around Attributes and Context that can be brain-burny even if they’re not playing, so they still feel like an active participatory role. I’ve played other games where you’re essentially just a tool the players use to check their locations, which feels a lot less fun and active. Some players may still find the aggressive asymmetry a bit weird, but it’s a lot better than other titles with similar things.
Overall: 8.75 / 10
Overall, I think Things in Rings is great! The game does a great job of keeping its finger perfectly on the Player Frustration Button without ever pressing it, and as a result, the gameplay balances player dread, the “I got it!”, and the complete confusion between the two pretty perfectly. It’s a very smart design. I appreciate the approachability of the game, as well: you really can jump in knowing just about nothing beyond “you need to place cards within this Venn diagram”, and even if you happen to play with someone who doesn’t know what a Venn diagram is, you can explain that and the game pretty quickly to boot. It’s a real testament to some of Allplay’s more recent pickups, and a genuinely excellent experience. There is a bit of strangeness to being The Knower, since you’re less of an active participant in the game and more of a facilitator, but even then I still found the job to be a lot of fun. You need to think a lot, you are responsible for your judgement calls, and you’re almost certainly going to get sassed at the end of the game for some split decisions you had to make. The only game I’ve played like it recently has been Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to the Ghost Town, and there, it really feels like the “facilitator” player is just a human-powered app, and I don’t mean that positively. Not as much my thing. I can see this game being favorably compared to the Codenames and Wavelength-style games, though it doesn’t quite enjoy their high player counts. Personally, I think that’s fine? I haven’t been at a game night with 10 people in almost five years, at this point, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. This is all to say that Things in Rings meets my needs extremely well and looks great doing it (that Dr. Seuss-style art is extremely fun). If you’re looking for a great party game, you enjoy word games and deduction, or you’re just a big fan of Venn diagrams (regardless of whether or not you’re running for President of the US), I’d definitely recommend Things in Rings! It’s a recent favorite.
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