Deception and Recall aren’t often mixed together in games, but it’s the crux of That’s Not a Hat which is both quick to learn and, coincidentally, incredibly easy to recall the rules of.
That’s Not a Hat is such a memorable, clever game that I’m surprised that nobody has made it before, or at least not in a way that’s quite as pure as it.
Play is unbelievably simple, with zero reading skills required and, despite its recommended play limit of up to eight, nothing really restricting it to a player count.
Everybody playing grabs a card from a shuffled deck of item cards. They place them face up in front of them so that everybody can see what everybody has, and then, from the first player onwards, they draw a card, reveal it to people and then place it face down, passing off the first card they have and saying what (they think) it was. The receiving player then either accepts it, or declares “That’s not a(n) [object]”. Regardless of the result somebody is gaining points, and the idea is that you have to have been called out, or have miscalled others, the most by the end of the game.
There you go. That’s it. Everything else is recall or a kind of diluted, poker-faced deception. If you can’t remember what it was that Terry gave to Joanna, gave to Rudy, to Marvin and then, in turn to you, then maybe you can remember something else that’s in play and Terry — who is now getting it back — might just believe you.
What I love about That’s Not a Hat is that pure simplicity. The little moment when your cool technique for remembering things completely fails but you have to pretend it hasn’t — that and the looks and noises people make as somebody says what the item is, based on them believing you or not.
There is one complication with That’s Not a Hat and that’s the item selection. There’s a floppy disk in there, or, as the yoof of 2day say ‘file? Errr. Save?’. It’s not a major issue, but it does mean that recall is a bit harder for them as they can’t rely on mental visualisation as much as those of us who remember a time before CD storage. That said, it’s much better that they did icons/images this way rather than going with words… because they bring with them even more localisation issues (even between nations and regions that speak the same language — from buns to baps and that’s before we start on brands).
That’s Not a Hat is incredibly simple, but that simplicity and ease of play is core to its endearing charm. It’s not a warm-up game that we’re going to part with for a long, long time.
That’s Not a Hat is available now from Amazon.
