Game Preview: Whozit?, or Naming Names in Games

Game Preview: Whozit?, or Naming Names in Games
Board Game: Whozit?
Board Game: Whozit?
Romaric Galonnier's Whozit? — published first in 2017 by Cocktail Games under the name Profiler before landing with Gamewright in the U.S. — fits the classic model of a party game in that you can explain it in a sentence: Based on these two clues and their position on the clue-meter, can you eliminate five of these characters one by one and leave behind only the one character being described by the clues?


From gallery of W Eric Martin


Everything else is details: how many rounds you're doing this and how you're rewarded for doing the thing well and penalized for not.

The interesting thing about these two games is how those details differ, with players in Profiler playing five rounds in a row and scoring 1 point for each character correctly removed, giving players a score from 0 to 25 at game's end, while in Whozit? no score is tracked other than your progress towards the final space on the track, with you even getting a push along the track at the end of four rounds if you haven't landed within striking distance of that goal.

I detail the difference between these approaches — and cover my own gameplay variant — in the video overview below, but one thing I didn't detail was the "beast mode" in Profiler that is absent from Whozit?, although playable with the included components. In this championship version of the game, you first complete a round with six characters, and if you ace that round, removing all five of the incorrect answers, then you play another round with seven characters, and if you ace that, then you play rounds with eight, then nine, then ten characters — and you need to win them all in order to call yourself champs. That goal seems akin to getting the perfect score in Hanabi while playing with the jokers: something to shoot for, but without getting your hopes too high...


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