:strip_icc()/pic6901954.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic5212719.jpg)
For more detail, here's all that I wrote about the game in February 2020:
Quote:
We'll close with a sneak peek at Aurélien Picolet's Top Ten from Cocktail Games, which will debut at FIJ 2020 in late February 2020 and which will not be released in English until 2021 at the earliest — which is a shame as this game would be my pick of the show, the title I would most want to play and share with others. (Indeed, I dragged Lincoln over to see it as he was doing other things when I first ran across this title during my picture-taking rounds on Sunday.)
I think what most excites me about the game is that similar to Codenames and Decrypto, you have the solid game-y structure that makes everything work functionally, but you, the player, are asked to inject your creativity into the game, and just reading the sample topic cards that Cocktail had on hand got my gears turning in good ways.
Top Ten seems somewhat similar to Wavelength, but with more detailed (yet still open-ended) topics that give you more direction in terms of creating answers. Another game along these lines is On a Scale of One to T-Rex, which like Wavelength comes from Wolfgang Warsch and various co-designers, but that game gives each player a specific task to perform at an intensity level of 1-10, with you choosing how to carry out that task, but not what the task is.
In any case, here's an overview of Top Ten:
This description is pretty much accurate, but it's somewhat limited given that I played only a couple of sample rounds in 2020. However, following the game's nomination for the 2022 Spiel des Jahres in late May, Cocktail Games offered to ship me a copy of the game for use at BGG.Spring 2022, while also sending me a rough English translation of the cards, so now I've finally played the game for real, with four games taking place at that convention and two other games taking place with my in-laws after returning home. (Full disclosure: Cocktail Games published my game Body Party in 2014 following an advance payment in 2013. That game was discontinued within two years with no further payments, and I've had no business dealings with Cocktail since that time.)I think what most excites me about the game is that similar to Codenames and Decrypto, you have the solid game-y structure that makes everything work functionally, but you, the player, are asked to inject your creativity into the game, and just reading the sample topic cards that Cocktail had on hand got my gears turning in good ways.
Top Ten seems somewhat similar to Wavelength, but with more detailed (yet still open-ended) topics that give you more direction in terms of creating answers. Another game along these lines is On a Scale of One to T-Rex, which like Wavelength comes from Wolfgang Warsch and various co-designers, but that game gives each player a specific task to perform at an intensity level of 1-10, with you choosing how to carry out that task, but not what the task is.
In any case, here's an overview of Top Ten:
wrote:
Your goal in Top Ten is to survive five rounds, so you and your fellow players need to figure out how to get things in order!
To start the game, place a number of unicorn tokens on the game board. Choose one player to be the round's chief. That player gives all players a random card numbered 1-10, then they read one of the five hundred theme cards included in the game, e.g., "Batman wants to replace Robin to fight the bad guys. Create a new duo 'Batman and ...' from the worst to the best." The chief looks at their number, then gives an answer based on their number. If they have a 1, they want to give the worst possible suggestion; if a 10, the best; if a 5-7, somewhere in the middle.
:strip_icc()/pic6883134.jpg)
Each other player then gives an answer to this theme based on the number they were dealt, then the chief needs to decide who has the lowest number, then the next lowest, and so on. For each mistake, the chief flips a unicorn token over to its poop side.
If all the unicorns have left by the end of the fifth round, leaving you with nothing but poop, then you lose. Otherwise you win!
To start the game, place a number of unicorn tokens on the game board. Choose one player to be the round's chief. That player gives all players a random card numbered 1-10, then they read one of the five hundred theme cards included in the game, e.g., "Batman wants to replace Robin to fight the bad guys. Create a new duo 'Batman and ...' from the worst to the best." The chief looks at their number, then gives an answer based on their number. If they have a 1, they want to give the worst possible suggestion; if a 10, the best; if a 5-7, somewhere in the middle.
Example cards from Spielwarenmesse 2020
Each other player then gives an answer to this theme based on the number they were dealt, then the chief needs to decide who has the lowest number, then the next lowest, and so on. For each mistake, the chief flips a unicorn token over to its poop side.
If all the unicorns have left by the end of the fifth round, leaving you with nothing but poop, then you lose. Otherwise you win!
Over those six games, I played with four, five, eight, and nine players. You use as many unicorn tokens as the number of players, except that with nine players, you still use only eight tokens because everyone but the round's captain gives an answer. Thus, with more players, you have more room for error, but you also have more opportunities to make mistakes since you have more answers to put in order.
And unlike what I initially wrote, 1 isn't automatically the worst and 10 the best because sometimes the scale isn't one of worst to best. Instead 1 corresponds with the "greenest" answer and 10 the "reddest", with green and red being defined in the particular situation, such as "scariest to bravest" or "most innocuous to most obvious".
My first impression of Top Ten — you, the player, are asked to inject your creativity into the game — has proven true over these six playings, and it's why I think Top Ten shines favorably when compared to Wavelength. In that game, only one person creates an answer that falls somewhere on a spectrum (e.g., square to round, sad song to happy song, introvert to extrovert), and that player's teammates need to guess where that answer falls. That's it. The game inspires creativity, yes, but you've got one shot at guessing where an answer falls, then you're done with that spectrum.
In Top Ten, everyone creates an answer, starting with the round's captain, and you tend to play off of what others are doing, collectively creating the boundaries and data points on that spectrum. In one round, for example, players had to explain where they would hide during a game of hide-and-seek on a scale from "found right away" to "never found". One player said that they got on a place to (I think) Tahiti, and it was clear immediately that they had the 10 — or at least it was clear to me since I held the 9, so I was then free to give an extremely wild answer in which I hid inside a vending machine in the basement of a parking garage, which seemed like an "easier to find" hiding spot than Tahiti, yet harder to find than any other answer folks would give. One player said they ran over a couple of blocks and down the street, then someone else, apparently feeling that player gave a 3 answer, said that they ran a couple of blocks away, then ducked behind a bush — and the round's captain correctly pegged them at a 4 after getting the other person's 3.
The more I played Top Ten, the more it felt like a cross between Wavelength and The Mind. Collectively we're all trying to get into the same frame of mind so that my 7 answer lines up with what your 7 answer would be so that we can thread our answers in just the right way for the captain to figure out how to order us.
What's more, when you're the round's captain, you give the first answer, which kind of sets the stage for what's to come. Not because everyone knows what your number is, but because your tone or energy carries over to everyone else. One situation had us miming our behavior as an exam monitor, from not paying attention to overzealous; another had us listening to a talking game box and telling the group what it said, from the meanest thing to the nicest; still another put us in the role of supreme dictator, announcing our first act from really nice to really nasty. You're not just giving an answer, but performing for the group thanks to situations that are far more involved and lively than the spectrums presented in Wavelength, while still being open-ended.
The only time Top Ten hasn't worked as well as I had hoped was in my first playing with my in-laws as my father-in-law just wasn't getting the concept, seemingly trying to guess every player's number (which is the expert mode of play) rather than guessing who had the lowest answer. By the second game, he was doing better, although he'll never be the ideal Top Ten player. That said, he would find Scout or Cascadia, the other two 2022 Spiel des Jahres nominees, impossible to play due to the number of rules in them, so at least this game was kind of working for him.
For more thoughts on Top Ten and why it's my clear choice for the 2022 Spiel des Jahres, check out this video:
:strip_icc()/pic7029375.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic7036898.png)
:strip_icc()/pic5937588.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic7035282.jpg)
/pic1903464.jpg)
