Just One was the 2019 Spiel des Jahres winner for Game of the Year and deservedly so.
The premise for this party game is simple. A word is revealed to all players except for the current round’s guesser. Each player than writes a word that will be a clue to the identity of the secret one. An arbitrator then looks at all of the words written down and takes out any that match, revealing the singular words to the guesser. Those are the clues on which they have to identify the secret word.
An amazingly simple concept that is just a load of fun when played in groups. Say the secret word is “birthday” and two people write down “cake”, two write down “candle” and the rest are a mix of “card”, “happy” and “born” (always figure there’s going to be one person in the group who will come up with a word which very well might be valid but is still so far away that it can throw the guesser off). The guesser will only see those last three words and it’s a lot harder to discern the correct answer when the most obvious clues are eliminated.
How do you win? Who cares! No, really, the fun is in the clue giving and guessing and, because it is a non-competitive game (i.e., cooperative), the only thing you are playing against is a table in the rule book that gives you some encouraging (or occasionally discouraging) statements based on the number of words you get right out of thirteen.
I don’t, personally, own a physical copy of the game. For this to really be fun, you probably have to gather at least five to seven people with the higher number giving you the most variety in clues.
Which is where BGA comes in. Last week, they moved Just One from Beta to general release so it is available for anyone to play. It really isn’t hard to gather a room with enough people to make the game really fun, except for one thing. Some of those people do not have English as their primary language.
Now, I’m not saying that everyone shouldn’t be able to play the game, but BGA really should look into matchmaking on a regional or language basis. Perhaps they should have multiple iterations of Just One in different languages and with different sets of tables.
Remember, with larger groups, there is a challenge with picking a word that describes the secret one but is just different or esoteric enough that it gets by the no duplicate rule. That can lead to a number of clues that are not your run-of-the-mill English. A number of times, I have seen someone from another non-English speaking country do well on one word as guesser but, the next time around, come right out and say “Sorry I couldn’t get that one. I don’t know most of those words.”
In another case, I ran into a situation where the secret word was “hat” and I gave the clue “chapeau”. A person from France started arguing that it wasn’t a legal clue because, in French, it was considered an abbreviation (let’s not get into the fact that this is a cooperative game and rules lawyering really doesn’t do anybody any good). For the rest of the game, he wouldn’t let it go, saying that the score was not legitimate because that word was not disallowed.
Again, this is NOT a criticism of these people or a claim that they shouldn’t be playing this game. They are doing the best that they can with a game only available in a second language to them or trying to deal with words that are used differently in English speaking countries versus their own.
What I am pointing out is that there needs to be some changes made to make a great game playable on the BGA site for ALL BGA users.
