It’s the night before Christmas and an imp has snuck themselves into the rank of Santa’s elves, planning a little bit of festive mischief. In Weird Little Elf, Santa has gathered his workforce and each must take turns answering a question, with the imp having to answer with a tell, before players try to root out the imposter.
Weird Little Elf is a quickfire deception game with a festive theme, but, notably, you can dump off that theme if you’re playing at other points of the year. One player takes on the role of Santa, and asks either a red-topped (festive) or blue-topped (non-festive question) then take a guess at which other player is the imp. If they’re right they get the imp card as a point, and if they’re wrong then that elf gets to guess from the remaining players to try to score the card. If they both fail? The imp keeps the point.
It’s an incredibly easy game to play, and once you’ve played it once you’ll never need to look at the rules again. Everything is simple, even down to the role assignments: Where you take one imp card and then one elf card for every other player who isn’t Santa, shuffle them and distribute them face down.
The real fun of the whole thing comes in that players can’t repeat the answer of other player and that the imp tell/quirks are sometimes really subtle (must touch another player in their answer) to obnoxiously obvious (must answer in an accent, or song). After a few rounds of playing our entire group had stopped being serious at all, laughing at one another’s answers, talking in silly voices or even our non-festive Santa (Chad) asking players to justify their answer rather than just give plain, single-word answers.
Weird Little Elf is a great little warm-up before playing something bigger, but I also think it could be easily rebranded for different holidays (or have a non-holiday version) due to its tight design.
Weird Little Elf is available now on their Kickstarter.
