We play a lot of party-style games at our house, as we have a group of friends that regularly come over for dinner parties and we are always looking for something fun to play after food. In A Nutshell feels like one of these games that are designed specifically for a party, it’s a trivia style game, but it’s still got a unique feel to it.
In a Nutshell divides all players into two teams; An acorn team and a peanut team. These teams get their own little icon to put on the score card, so that you can keep track of your team’s score as you play. If it’s your team that goes first then one member of your team is selected as a Nut Picker. That player gets to read the full trivia question and answer, which are stored in this long, windowed box that has different slats across it, covering each of the words.
Once you have determined how easy or difficult the question is, you will need to choose what sliders to keep open (with a limit of four total) and what should be closed from the question. Your goal is to reveal enough of the question that your team can solve the answer without opening up another slider. However, after your team has discussed and guessed incorrectly, the other team gets a go at discussing and guessing. If they get it correctly, they steal your points. Then, the icons move around the score card depending on what you ended up doing.
The next team then takes their turn. There is a secondary way to play, which works with fewer people, that has each team picking which slider they want to open up and then guessing when they feel that they have enough of the information themselves. In a Nutshell does feel like a good take on a trivia game, especially as you need to sort of guess what the question is and then figure out if you know the answer.
In a Nutshell has a bunch of fantastic trivia questions, with enough variety to really last a bunch of games. I do like how these trivia questions are good for all ages and that so many of them are designed where if you do not see one specific word, there could be more than one answer, so the guess feels very risky!
You can purchase In a Nutshell on Amazon.
