My new party game has just been released by Hasbro, under the Parker Brothers label, and it may be of interest to game show fans since the gameplay will be familiar.
The game is called
Tie One On and should be showing up on Wal-Mart shelves within the next week or two (it will be exclusively available at Wal-Mart for the first year).
Gameplay is a lot like Pyramid. Players pair up to give and receive clues to a list of 7 items in 45 seconds. Partnerships are not fixed-- you pair up with a different player every turn. The items in each set of 7 are linked to each other in one of four possible ways:
- Common word (BOX office, think outside the BOX, shadow BOX)
- Rhyming
- Last phoneme of one word is the first phoneme of the next (COMPUTER, TERMITE, MIGHTY MOUSE)
- Free association (ala Chain Reaction)
I'd expect readers of this forum to be expert at this type of game, and so 45 seconds may yield a lot of perfect scores. If so, you may prefer playing with the following rules changes:
- Use an electronic kitchen timer or stopwatch instead of the included sand timer. If a team gets all 7 words correct, stop the clock immediately and award 1 bonus point for every 3 seconds left on the clock, rounding up.
- Play through the entire match-up list (about 20 turns) instead of to a fixed score.
I talk about the game a little bit more at
my blog.