Can You Guess What's Inside the Box?

What’s in the box? Cowboy boots or octopus? Hard to say…but you’re being told it would make a good tattoo.

Published by Hobby World and Magellan, Inside the Box is a clue-giving guessing game for 2-6 players.

Gameplay

Each package card shows an item or object of some kind. At the start of the game, you place 25 of these in a five-by-five grid on the table. A plus sign is placed beneath the grid on the far right and a negative sign is placed beneath on the far left. Each player takes three player tokens of his player color.

Players will take turns being the leader. The leader draws a placement card to see which package card he is trying to get the other players to guess. He then draws two category cards. These are things such as ‘a collectible’ or ‘can be a tattoo’. For each category card, he reads it out loud to the group and then places it either closer to the minus or plus sign based on how well his object fits with the category card. He is allowed to make a small comment about why he is placing the category card in that specific location between the minus sign and plus sign, but it should be vague.

All of the other players then make a guess. You can place a token on a card if you believe you know exactly which package card it is, you can place it between two cards, or you can place it at the corners of four adjacent cards. The leader then draws another category card and the process is repeated along with everyone making a second guess. The same thing is then done a third time.

Finally, the correct package card is revealed and points are scored. Players score four points for a token that is on the correct package card, two points for a token that is between two cards with one being the correct package, and one point for a token that is between four that include the correct package. The leader earns the same number of points that each player got for their highest-scoring guess.

A new package card replaces the one from the previous round, and a new round begins with a new player taking on the role of leader. The first player to reach 25 points wins the game.

Review

Inside the Box is a fun party game that leads to some interesting thought experiments as you try to figure out how the wide range of objects could fit into the different categories. Not every player is going to see eye-to-eye, which adds to the fun, challenge, and discussions that take place during the game.

Going through three phases of guessing for each round gives a fun sense of homing in more and more on the correct object, or at least building more of a general mental image of what type of object it might be. Players can choose to hedge their bets or double down, and being able to choose whether to guess on only one card with a token or go for fewer points but better odds by guessing two or four cards at a time, makes for interesting choices and some light push-your-luck elements.

The scoring felt a little off for the role of the leader, however. You can really pull ahead in that role if you get lucky, and it doesn’t feel entirely balanced, especially when playing with more people. If the game continued with each playing being the leader a certain number of times, rather than trying to reach a score of 25 points, this could resolve the issue.

There is a nice range of both object cards and categories, which makes for a nice variety. The object cards are in fact double-sided, which makes replacing previous cards easier (just flip them over the first time they are used). We would have liked a few more category cards, especially as the more imaginative or unusual ones are actually quite fun.

Inside the Box doesn’t bring a ton of new ideas to the table, and this type of game feels pretty familiar at this point, but it’s still a perfectly enjoyable, fun experience, that is well presented and that you can have a lot of fun with.

Pros:  Component quality, scoring for the guessers, three phases of guessing for each round

Cons: Scoring for the leader doesn’t feel balanced, more category cards could have been included

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.