Get the Ick: A Party Game of Social Cringe

Which is more ick: someone trying and failing to start a conga line, running for a train that’s not actually going anywhere, or someone who calls himself a foodie?

Published by Big Potato Games, Get the Ick is a party game for 2-8 players, all about guessing what scenarios your fellow players will deem to be ‘ick’.

Gameplay

Each round, a different person is the active player. Three scenario cards are drawn, read aloud, and placed face-up in the center of the table. Each card lists some action or thing a person you like might do, that might potentially be a turn off.

The active player has four large tokens — two are blank, one shows an ick emoji, and one shows a positive emoji. The active player places three of these face-down, one on each scenario. He must always place the ick emoji, but may choose whether to place the positive one or not.

Next, each other player votes on which card he believes the active player put the ick emoji on. Alternatively, if confident, a player can instead vote on which card he believes the active player put the positive emoji on.

After everyone has voted, the large tokens are turned over, revealing which scenario the active player chose as the turn-off, and which, if any, he found to be a positive thing someone might do.

Scoring is described as optional in the rulebook. If a player guesses where the ick token is, he scores a point. If he guesses where the positive token is, he scores three points. If half or more of the players correctly guessed where the ick token is, the active player scores one point. If anyone guessed where the positive token was, the active player scores three points, but he loses one point if no one guesses it correctly. After everyone has been the active player once, the game ends and the player with the most points wins.

Review

Get the Ick is very simple, with straightforward rules, and all together it takes about a minute to set up and teach. It’s understood that the discussions and back-and-forth between the players is the core of what makes this style of game enjoyable, and therefore while there are scoring rules, they don’t push them as important.

The scoring does work well, though, and it’s fun that the positive token has a risk/reward element to it for the active player using it. Guessing it’s on the table is an uncertainty as well, since there’s no way to know if it was even used this round.

We found the scenarios on the cards to be a strange collection, however. A few did seem like something that could be a turn-off or it was clear why they were on the cards, and obviously the game has that positive token, so some of these things aren’t necessarily bad. It’s more about quirks and pet peeves, if anything. But a lot of them just seemed like non-issues. Still having a Yahoo email address? Not paying for Spotify Premium? Maybe we were somehow missing the spirit of the game, but having a problem with some of these seemed petty at best.

It’s nice to find a more adult-focused party game that is not inappropriate, and we were pleasantly surprised that there was really only one card here that was in the PG-range. But the scenarios presented were, for the most part, not that interesting and failed to illicit the conversation and debates that you want from a game like this. If you like the idea, I would recommend checking out Dream Crush, a game with a very similar concept, that goes into slightly more PG territory, but leads to a lot more spirited conversation. This one just left us scratching our heads once too often and asking each other: “Why would that be a problem?”

Pros: Can be taught and set up within a minute, portable, scoring system works well, party game that focuses on the conversations it creates rather than mechanics

Cons: Many of the scenarios did not seem interesting enough

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