Our board game group has been playing a lot of guessing games as of late — games that allow us to use cards or tiles to guess things that are going on. Mr Lovestein Presents: No Context is one of these guessing games, where you must place BIDS to guess what each other player has as their special card while they pick cards to give clues.
The board itself is presented in a bit of an awkward way — something that you do need to get used to, especially if you have players playing at the back of the board, seeing everything upside-down. There are a bunch of cards placed at the top of the board, which will be the cards that you might be guessing at. Each player will receive a black and white number card to tell them what specific card from the top they are trying to get others to guess.
Mr Lovenstein Presents: No Context then has a bunch of cards at the bottom of the board, which are the cards that will be picked when needing to describe your top card. Each player has their own character, shown in the middle of the boards, as well as Bet cards which can be placed by other player’s slots to guess what card they are trying to tell you. Once you place a bet, you cannot take it back or place another one on that player, but if you wait too long to place a bet — even if it’s correct — you might not get any points. So it’s a bit of a high-risk high reward type of game.
On your turn, you can pick a card from the bottom and place it on your character’s three-card slot area. The cards have a YES (green) and NO (red) side, so you can sort of say it is like this card or it is not like this card. You will get three rounds to do this, going around the table clockwise. Bets can be placed at any time on any player, even if it’s not their turn, so if you have a group of particularly intense players, they might be placed after one card is done or while others are taking their turn.
After all of the cards are placed, players will go around, one by one, revealing their black and white cards, before explaining their choices. Then, they reveal the bets, starting with the first bet that was placed. Whoever was first to get the correct bet gets two of the three cards that were placed on the board, with the second person to get it correct getting the last card of the three. The person who was placing the cards in that specific area gets the card from the top. If nobody gets it right, nobody gets anything. These cards represent points. After three rounds of the game, whoever has the highest amount of cards wins.
The concept of Mr Lovenstien Presents: No Context is sound, and there’s a lot of fun to be had, especially as you learn how your friends think. The yes and no sides of the cards were interesting, as some people used them to say they are the opposite of this, while others used them to say this card has nothing to do with the card I am trying to tell you.
You may have noticed from the pictures that Mr Lovenstein: No Context, this board game has artwork from a comic book artist, who I best recognize from Twitter. The cards themselves are panels from these comics, so some of them do link up, but for those who do not know the comics themselves, it’s all about interpretation. This makes for an interesting game that is not only quite quick but very fun to play.
You can pick up a copy of Mr Lovenstein Presents: No Context on Amazon.
