If you're looking for a new game to play with friends that isn't Cards Against Humanity, The Voting Game is for you. A card game that involves all players and can be played with up to 10 people, it starts with everyone getting a number card that identifies them for the remainder of the game. Then there are various questions cards which are read aloud, and the players get to vote for who they believe most fits the question on it.

After finding The Voting Game on a list of new party games to try, I decided to buy the game and the three expansion packs also made for the game: NSFW (not safe for work), Fill in the Blank, and Create Your Own. The NSFW expansion allows for many laughs and interesting questions for friends to get to know each other better. Fill in the Blank requires players to think on their feet, as they must fill in the question blanks with ideas of their own creation. Create Your Own is a way for players to add specificity to the game by writing their own question cards with ideas and places with which all players will be familiar. These expansions can either be played on their own with the voting cards, or mixed in with the other decks. We chose to keep the decks separate this time, as we were all unfamiliar with the game.

Next was rounding up a group of friends willing to play, which was fairly easy, as having a large friend group makes gathering people an easy task. Once everyone was clear on the rules, we set to playing the game. Our group was large enough to allow for diversity in the answers since we ended up playing with 8 people. We played through a large number of cards from the original deck, the entire NSFW expansion, and about a quarter of the way through the Fill in the Blank pack. Since none of us had ever played before we decided to keep the Create Your Own pack for later and come up with cards later.

The first question we played with anonymous voting and had players guess who voted for them. Unanimously we didn't find this to be very fun, and instead had open voting for the rest of the game, where each player would put their card in front of them and then we had a group reveal. This induced many more laughs and stories, as players defended and explained why they chose who they did. The stories either highlighted why the players were correct in their guesses or how they were completely wrong since the card would have applied much better to another player.

A sample of the type of question cards

The only drawback to the game is that some of the cards didn't apply to but one or two players, so they had to be thrown out from play, since they were either too pointed, or more negative in their responses. I would advise against playing this game with people who are easily offended, since while most of the cards can be laughed off with the right group, some people may take the responses too personally and get upset. This wasn't much of a problem with the group I played with, since we were able to either throw out the question or move on without much of an awkward transition.

Overall, this is a very fun game that will change depending on the group that plays it, as the same card may apply to different people. I thoroughly enjoyed playing it with the group I did, and can't wait to bring The Voting Game back to campus with me in the fall to play with other friends.

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