Game Overview: What Were You Thinking about Green Team Wins and Herd Mentality?

I love thinking about games at different conceptual levels. In one sense, games boil down to being first, last, or most — that is, being first to a goal, being the last one standing, or holding the most when the game ends. (In co-operative games, the game itself is the antagonist that you must defeat to be last or your past selves are the competitors who you must topple to have most.) This bare bones classification is akin to how some view stories as falling into one of seven plots: overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth.

Not all stories fit into those plots, of course, but most do, similar to how most games can be viewed as having one of those three victory conditions — yet those conditions aren't getting to the heart of what a game can be. After seeing Green Team Wins from Nathan Thornton and 25th Century Games get a lot of attention at Gen Con 2022, I borrowed the copy from the BGG Library because I was curious as to how it would compare to Herd Mentality, a 2020 release from Rich Coombes, Dan Penn, and Big Potato, not to mention What Were You Thinking? from Richard Garfield and Wizards of the Coast, which debuted pre-BGG in 1998.

First, last, most

All three of these games are built around the same concept: You are rewarded for thinking the same as your fellow players. Each round you're given a prompt, and if you are part of the group that responds to this prompt the same way, you score...most of the time. What hit me only in retrospect, even after I recorded the overview video below, is that each design has you win a different way: first, last, and most.

• In Herd Mentality, everyone who is part of the clear majority scores 1 point, and the first player to 8 points wins. (In a tie, keep playing rounds until one player moves in front of everyone else.)

• In What Were You Thinking?, the player or players in the out group move up a penalty track, and when one or more players reach the end of the track, they're out of the game and everyone else wins. ("Last one standing" can have more than a single player be "one", as in co-operative games.)

• In Green Team Wins, you play fifteen rounds, then whoever has the most points wins.

The details of gameplay differ in terms of how they handle ties and what types of prompts are included. Herd Mentality includes an additional gameplay element, with a pink cow being "awarded" to a player if their answer is the only one that doesn't match anyone else's.

Image: Ludus Mundi

This player can continue to score points, but until that cow is claimed by another player, they can't win the game. This superfluous detail can feel like a poke in the eye for the person who is already part of the out group, but its presence adds something to each round: Who's going to get it? And once someone is in the lead, will the cow end up in their hands? The pink cow gives everyone else a tiny bit of hope that they still have a chance to win.

For details how to play and score each game, lots of examples of game prompts, and thoughts on each design and how they compare — including 2016's Hive Mind, which addressed an unfortunate design element in What Were You Thinking? — watch this video: