VNTYPL8S Review: PRTYG4M3
Transcript
Hi everybody. Welcome out to the Dice Tower. My name is Chris Yee. Today I'm taking a look at a party game from designer Clarence Simpson, a designer I like a lot of his games. Uh and he's done some quite varied things, nothing exactly quite like this. This is um Vignette Yo Plays, a game about yogurt, I guess. So, in this game you are going to be giving clues to make other people guess your words, but the little hook, the little gimmick of it is that you are writing them on vanity license plates. Oh, I get it.
Use vanity plates set up on the table. Each player is going to get a license plate dry erase board with a state and then one of the dry erase uh markers here. Everyone is going to be dealt an owner card and a requirement card. And this is a clue giving game. With the owner card, it'll tell you a type of person. So, in my case, I have the word billionaire. You might have cave diver or some sort of job description. Mine is simply billionaire. I'm going to keep the secret and I need to write a clue on here representing what a billionaire might have customized on their license plate. The requirements card here that's dealt along shows characters that I must use. So, keeping this all secret, I'm going to write a clue on here and all players do this simultaneously. Uh now, there are some restrictions in what you can write uh shown very clearly here in the rule book. Only numbers and uppercase letters, no spaces, punctuation, drawings. And I can't use any part of the word billionaire in my clue.
So, what I can do since I cannot use vowels, uh I could do M 3 in lieu of an E, G 4 in lieu of an A, and then R 1 C H. So, you'll notice that what I've done here is I've used the requirement characters that I have in the word mega rich. Now, once I will keep the secret and once all players are ready, we're going to throw our owner cards here into the middle of the table and then we're also going to deal in six more. So, we're going to shuffle these up and then set them up face up on the table for everyone to see. So, you can see doomsday prepper and vegan and so on and so forth. You see all of these different words here.
You're going to take turns revealing your license plate. So, I'm going to reveal mine is this. Now, people have to try to interpret try to determine what it is uh and figure it out. Now, see billionaires out here, but also accountant. So, people might be thinking that. Maybe an e-sports champion is mega-rich, but people are going to in free form in any order they want try to guess a clue. Now, let's say that the person who has the New York plate over here, they are going to guess accountant. And they guess first. I simply say that is not correct. So, then anyone else in free form, no turns or anything, can say, "Oh, well, billionaire." That's correct. So, Florida over here is going to take this card as a point and going to show that I did use all my required letters and characters and I will retain this for myself as a point.
Basically, if you don't use your requirements, you lose one point in the round. The next person is going to reveal their license plate for all players to see. So, we see here h8dply r. So, once again, in free form, people can say, "Well, uh e-sports champion." Right? Yeah, hate the player. There we go. I'll get this point and uh they reveal that they used their required characters. So, you simply just continue doing this uh around the table and then once everybody has gone, I'm going to leave these here for you to try to guess which words these are for. Uh but yeah, there you go. So, you play three rounds like that and whoever has the most points at the end of the three rounds is the winner of the game.
Starting off with the production of this game, I think that they knocked it out of the park. I think 25th Century did a great job with this I'm not sure if it was kind of from the designer or from the publisher exactly, but it definitely feels intrinsically tied together. This is probably about license plates from the get-go, right? Else why would you come up with this fun eight letter eight character kind of restriction thing on it. But it looks really good. Every time people walk by every time people play or just walk by the table, they see the Hawaii license plate and they go "McLovin." Without fail. So, I think it did a good job of you know picking some of the the notable license plates and and they they I think are these are like the 90s license plates because I recognize them and I am turning into an old man. But I think that it's a it's a nice touch there.
The dry erase markers that they included in the boards work well. I appreciated the boards are double-sided. They didn't have to be, but it means that your game will last twice as long. The markers do erase, I think, very cleanly for the most part, but at some point you might get smudgy. Hey, also fun fact, you should not, as you play the game, wipe it with your thumb because that or your fingers, whatever, cuz that will put oils onto the board. So, use the the markers included have erasers on them. I think that's always a great touch. I think that's always nice when publishers do that. Otherwise, I think the rules are well laid out and I was able to understand it for the most part really well. I did misplay one thing, I'll explain very quickly. I also appreciate that there's a credit given to the game designer, Claire Simpson, of course, but also the content designer, Nathan Thornton, which what I'm I assume that that means is who went in and helped come up with a lot of the clue and the prompt words and everything. Which I think that that's cool to kind of give that credit for.
like when I first saw Stonemaier give credit uh to the 3D sculptor of the miniatures in in I think Tapestry. I think that those little things are are just overall good and I wanted to give a quick shout-out. But, turn to the actual gameplay, will you like it? I think that if you look at this and you saw the rules explanation, if it was one of the things where you're saying, "I want to be playing along with that." then you're going to enjoy the game. It's not the deepest party game, but it's not trying to be. It's trying to have a good little gimmick to it with the license place. I don't mean gimmick in a negative sense, right? But kind of that component draw is maybe a a better word for it. And it kind of sticks to it. I think there's a few little funky things, so if you're playing with people that are not used to, for example, using letter numbers as letters or numbers as part of words, you explain like, "Hey, that's it's going to be kind of an important part of the game. You should know that if you want to use an E, but you're not allowed to use vowels in this game, you got to use a three." It's little things like that, right? But players will catch on pretty quick.
I think it forces some interesting creativity. I like the requirement cards, but man are they sometimes really difficult. And sometimes you'll pull off something that was like so clever and good and sometimes it'll kind of direct your clue. Other times you look at the the the owner card, like your prompt card, and you say, "Well, I'm just going to use like a strong clue and then I have a G and a seven at the end because I just can't fit it in." I've had people argue, "Is that in the spirit of the game or not?" Uh but I think basically what it comes down to is you made a good clue in six characters and then had to have a G and a seven at the end instead of having all eight characters to work with. So, I'm fine with that, uh but I think people will will you just innately want to take those required letters and like make a clever clue out of it, which I think is a good drive, a good feeling to have in the game. And other times you're like, "Well, that's the best I can do." I I of my bigger complaints, unfortunately, is that on the owner cards, on the prompt cards, it'll say the name or like the descriptor of the person, but underneath it has a little description, which is cute, and some of them are very funny.
Sometimes they're Simpsons references. I see you, and I respect. Game recognizes game. Uh but sometimes the little description words are words that I would want to use in my clue. And I did have to triple-check the rulebook. You're not allowed to have your main clue be any part of the actual uh like the main subject, the Cupid or billionaire or whatever. But I think that you're allowed to use words that are in the bottom of the card. I'm not sure if that was done on purpose to help guide you, but I almost feel like it's a slight negative. But then again, this there is a real-time kind of judging factor. So, the rule that I mis- misplayed the first time that I I played it, and if you were in that group, sorry this is if this is how you find out. Uh you take turns revealing your license plate, and then people guess amongst the pool, your word, everybody else's words, and then six extras.
Uh I misread it, and I thought that you did it like one person at a time clockwise guessing, and that was actually kind of fun. The actual intent of the game, it says that everyone can free-form guess. It's the reveal your license plate in turn order that I misinterpreted. So, I think what's neat about that is that you have all the words out there, and people are are trying to guess and figure out what your clue means, right? "Mega rich" is written down, and people go, "Okay, well, what is that?" And sometimes, with these types of games, when you add in the extra cards, sometimes you'll have multiple things that are very similar to each other. And so, because it has this real-time guessing element to it, uh not stressful real-time, but if if you commit to something first, you might eliminate the wrong answer, and everyone else now knows, "Okay, well, it's not that one."
And And other people so they jump in and say, "Oh, I I bet it's this one now." But I do kind of like that it rewards the person who's willing to go to be bold because they also might get the clue first. And I think that this is a very human drive to say like I want to guess first anyway. So, I think overall this is a good a well-made and fun party game. I I enjoy it. I think that there's the few negatives that I think people lock up because the requirement letters are just too difficult. It's just so so hard to make match with the thing. But it's also not a game I'm taking too seriously. Uh so, overall I like it. I think that the the hook of it, the idea of these like license plates being how you give the clues, the game almost teaches itself once people see the components they go, "Oh, I think I know what to do here." So, that's good. I think that a party game like this deserves uh to be recognized and I I like playing it and I would play it some more. So, I'm giving it a seven. A seal of approval, a recommendation saying, "Yeah, if if this looks fun to you, if as you're watching the overview video you're basically playing along and wanted to play along and want to come up with your own clues, it lives up to that. If you're not sure, then it might not be your type of party game. But for me, I like this. So, seven saying I'm recommending Vanity Plates.
So, thanks for coming out to this review here on The Dice Tower. My name is Chris Yee and folks, you have yourselves a great day.
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