Intro
Batman or Superman? Ninjas or Pirates? T-Rex or Stegosaurus? If you’ve ever wondered “What’s The Best Thing?” then look no further; there is a game for it. No longer just the perennial playground (or online forum) question, you can now agree to disagree in the form of a cooperative card game. The premise is straightforward; everyone works together to put together an arbitrary list of things in order of preference. The slight twist is that rather than ranking things within a given category, you’re instead ranking things across disparate categories. So less “Charmander or Squirtle” (Charmander, obviously) and more “lychees or orcas”.
What’s in the box?
Before I explain how the game is played, you might want to know what comes with the game. Inside the box you’ll find 40 double-sided category cards, 20 number cards, 4 life tokens, 2 signs (Best and Worst), 1 Shhh! token, and a double-sided rules leaflet. These components are bright and colourful, and the box’s small physical footprint means that it’s easy to slip into a small bag or even a large coat pocket.
The box and (almost all of) its contents
Component quality is generally good and, while the two cardboard signs feel slightly flimsy, you only really need the category and number cards to properly play the game. There’s nothing particularly fancy to see in terms of presentation. The colours are bright and the text is clear, and the rules are presented clearly and linearly. The overall design is functional, though there is little to differentiate it from a dozen other similarly sized and priced party games.
How I reviewed this
The box doesn’t seem to indicate an upper limit of players, only that they should be aged 10+ and that you need at least 2 people to play. I decided a group of 10+ adults was the perfect stress-test for the game. However, before I took this along to a games night to see if we could figure out what was indeed the Best Thing™, I made sure to watch the How to Play video linked to via a QR code on the box. Although the rules are very straightforward, I’ll admit that I absorbed very little from the video. That is less a comment on the quality of the video than my attention span at the time. As the game seemed straightforward on the surface, I thought it would be best to give the rules a skim, get stuck into the game, and re-read them in situ.
How the game works
As it turns out, the game is indeed very straightforward. Each round, every player is dealt a card numbered between 1 and 10, inclusive. On your turn, you take the Shhh! token, look at your number card in secret, and then select one of three category cards. There are a wide variety of categories included in the deck, including the likes of Fruit, Headwear, Ice Cream Flavours, and Mythical Creatures. With your number in mind as a rating, you pick something from that category that you think best reflects that rating. Let’s say you had a 9 and think that bananas are really quite fantastic, you simply proclaim ‘banana!’ and put your number card face-down underneath the category card. This is where the Shhh! token comes into play, because you are now to remain silent for the rest of the turn.
Brightly presented rules which link to a ‘How-to-play’ video
Once a word is provided for the category, the other players will discuss (politely or otherwise) where the bananas rank relative to any other cards in play. Players can only discuss the cards in relative terms e.g. “I think they prefer bananas to Branston Pickles” or “I think 2 Fast 2 Furious should be ranked higher than bananas”. Once they’ve placed the ‘Fruit’ card in the order, it’s now locked in for the remainder of the round. The first round ends when five cards have been placed in order of preference, at which point the rankings are revealed. If everything has been placed in numerical order, great! If a number is out of order, the team loses 1 of 4 lives.
Assuming players survive, the game runs for a total of 3 rounds, with the number of cards to rank increasing each round: first to 8 and then 10.
A difficult third round – two lives lost!
There’s a little bit of nuance to the ranking system in that you’ll have to balance someone’s personal preference for the thing in question versus how much people generally seem to like it. Personally, if I had a 1 and my category was ‘Sauces and Condiments’, I’d say “mayonnaise” with absolutely no hesitation. However, if I was playing with people who didn’t know me, they could wrongly assume I might have rated it less accurately. In practice, our 10-person team did quite well for the most part, though we faltered at the last hurdle that time we collectively decided that Secret Hitler (the game, to be clear) was somehow better than the majestic orca. It took us a few rounds to find our rhythm but there were surprisingly few disagreements for a large group.
Pesky orcas!
How Long Does it Take to Play?
A full 4-round game of What’s The Best Thing is pretty quick, generally clocking in at around 30 to 40 minutes. Obviously, this depends on your group dynamic and how quickly players can come to an agreement on the ranking of things. As I didn’t play it with a small group, it may be that a group of 4 or 5 might breeze through it. That is, unless they have particularly incredulous views.
How Often Should You Play?
This isn’t really an everyday game, but rather a fun starter to ease people into a game night or to keep a larger group engaged. I can’t comment on whether this might suffer from diminishing returns if played frequently, but it is at least likely to remain fresh enough if you play it with different groups.
Final Thoughts
We had good fun with What’s The Best Thing?; probably more than I was expecting. It is a solid choice when you need something straightforward that accommodates a large group without requiring a lengthy deep dive into a rulebook (or three - looking at you Maladum). It certainly won’t hold your attention for an entire evening, though it also doesn’t promise to have any strategic depth. It is perfectly suited as a social lubricant. I think this would also be a good ice-breaker game for groups who don’t know each other very well. In a perfect world, nothing would bond strangers faster than a shared revulsion over someone’s love for mayonnaise. If you treat this as what it’s billed as, as an occasional light-hearted opener rather than a main event, it provides plenty of entertainment for the price point.
