Sell Ridiculous Products with a Clever Headline in Clickbait

How would you sell a zero-gravity restaurant or a 25-hour news channel? Come up with a headline, but it might not be as easy as you expect when the words have to start with specific letters.

Clickbait is a party game designed by Reiner Knizia and published by Big Potato Games. With players coming up with funny answers and the judge choosing his favorite, it shares several elements with similar party games but with its own creative twist.

Gameplay

Players shuffle the product deck and place it in the center of the table. Each player takes a pencil and pad. Every round another player will be the judge. The judge draws a product card and reads it aloud. The products are all silly or absurd things such as an indestructible piñata or a three day clown course.

The judge then rolls the five letter dice, which will get you five letters. The other players must now come up with a headline/sentence to sell the product. The sentence can have up to five words in it, and each word in the sentence must begin with a different one of the letters shown on the dice.

All the answers are then handed to the judge who shuffles them before reading them aloud one at a time. The judge then picks his favorite answer. The winner takes the product card and becomes the judge for the next round. The first player to earn three product cards wins the game.

Review

Clickbait is a simple to learn party game that has several elements in common with other judging games, but there’s an extra level of creativity and challenge involved in coming up with your answers based on the letters rolled. We enjoyed the unpredictability of what letters you’ll have to work with, while not being constrained to use them all helps to prevent players from becoming completely stuck.

The product cards are generally funny and they lend themselves well to wacky headlines. None of them exceeds a PG rating, but the humor is often more targeted towards adults and teenagers, and the game’s 12+ rating seems fair based on that.

Unlike other similar games, players aren’t just picking a card and passing them to the judge, which is what sets the game apart — however, this does mean there’s more downtime for the judge each round. Perhaps a timer or a voting system (rather than judging) would be better to minimize or remove this downtime.

The arrow shaped box is a little unwieldy for storage, but it's creative, and the components are well made. The components themselves do not actually take up a lot of space and could easily be carried in some kind of travel pouch for portability.

Clickbait is a creative twist on a popular genre of games, while keeping gameplay intuitive and easy to teach and play. If you enjoy party games centered around funny answers, this one is worth checking out even if you already have several others that are similar.

Pros: Creative twist on a popular genre

Cons: Box is unwieldy, downtime for the judge

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