Game Overview: Subtext, or Drawing in a Goldilocks Game

Like Dixit, A Fake Artist Goes to New York, Spyfall, and other communication-based party games, Wolfgang Warsch's Subtext is a Goldilocks game. To do well in the game, you need to communicate with others not too much and not too little, but just the right amount.

Subtext debuted from German publisher Edition Spielwiese in February 2019, with the English edition appearing from Stronghold Games in May 2019. Each round in the game, the active player looks at a word or name on one of the cards, then mixes this card with other cards and distributes them to the other players. Thus, one player shares the same word as the active player, but neither party knows who their partner is.

Each player then draws an image of their word or name, then everyone reveals those images, with the active player's image on one side of the playing board and everyone else's image on the other. Each player then secretly votes for the image they think is partnered with the active player's image. What would you vote for in the image below?

Playing with erasable boards so that I can better see what people draw

If the active player and the partner correctly find one another, then they score points equal to the number of incorrect answers. They're rewarded for being obscure, for making others not find the connection between their two images — but if they're too far off-base, they might not find each other, which means they'll score nothing.

If other people correctly find the partner amidst all the camouflage, they score 1 point, plus points equal to the number of incorrect answers. They don't care whether the active player and partner find each other because they'll score more points that way.

That's the basics of play. I go into more detail in this overview video, while explaining why I had to replace the drawing material: