Overview & How to Play

Monikers is just guessing terms written on cards, in two teams!

On your turn, your team has a minute to guess as many cards as possible. One person gives hints, the others try to guess in real time. Once your minute is up, the other team goes. When the deck is depleted, meaning all the cards have been guessed, you move on to the next round.

Round 2 has players giving ONE word clues, that’s right, you just say a single word. The final round is in fact CHARADES, where you silently pantomime your cards.

If these rounds sound like they’re getting too tricky, don’t worry, because you’re using the same deck of cards throughout the game. The winner of the entire game is that which has won the most rounds, meaning they’ve guessed the most amount of points from their teammates’ hints.

Pros

The main draw of Monikers is that you can play THE charades without feeling like an idiot! There is a really nice progression of using the same exact cards from the 1st to the 3rd round, meaning that everyone will be familiar with all the cards that can be guessed. There’s gonna be FAR less of those uncomfortable moments of everyone scratching their heads, as one friend jumps up and down with their eyes wide open, making them feel like an idiot, and everyone else is stupefied.

With that, this game is incredibly accessible, and takes about 30 seconds to teach. There’s just this capacity to have fun, inside jokes with others as you give clues, as they guess them, albeit these inside moments can be a little forced at times as you hit the same cards over and over again.

Luckily, with the game’s copious amounts of terms, from Brutus, to Baby Einstein, to Amelia Earhart, to… inappropriate cards, if you don’t know what they mean, the game tells you. There’s good descriptions on cards to get people out of a rut, and that has helped MANY a stuck player in our playthroughs.

Cons & Nitpicks

Yeah, actually speaking of these cards, the pop culture pool that spews out these terms is strictly for those born in the early 1990s and watched a lot of TV. We understand at most half of the cards here at Shelfside (born in 1997, with older siblings born in early 1990s). This has led to a lot of people just memorizing cards from the play deck, and its order, as it gets passed around. It’s no longer guessing clues if you don’t know what the term to guess is, rather memorizing exact names and locations on the deck if you want to win.

In fact, if you want to win, you’ll probably find that some of the points on the cards do NOT line up with how hard is to guess. But that’s extremely subjective, and your mileage may vary based off of how culturally relevant this game is to your group.

Final Thoughts

Monikers just ends up being a polarizing game, not by structure, just with its extremely specific cards. For that target audience, who is currently around their 30s and is familiar with things like “A Planeteer”, or “Joey Chestnut”, or “Alex Trebek without a Moustache”, would feel right at home. We highly recommend looking at the list of cards included with this game before buying. Check out the print and play here.

If you think you hit this game’s audience, you have a game where you can act out “Leroy Jenkins'“ or “Your Mom” in highly specific ways, as people know what it is, and seriously, who hasn’t played charades before anyways? Just play with all adults.