What’s The Best Thing? is a ranking game where the ranks are hidden

Rating things is incredibly easy, in fact, we often do it automatically as we think about things. However, What’s The Best Thing? challenges you, as a group, to rank five, then eight, then ten, random things in the correct order, and that’s much trickier.

What’s the Best Thing? is a simple game of concealed ranking of random things. The concealed element, where you need to name an item within a category, is a surefire conversation starter regardless of how well people know each other. Where would you put Anchovies on a list of pizza toppings? And would you say that’s better, or worse, than a cucumber is a vegetable? With those two in mind, how does Rom-Com rank as a film genre?

It all sounds, and is, incredibly fun. What’s especially interesting, and the thing that stops it from simply being an icebreaker, is that it’s a fully co-operative experience. What I mean by that is that the players only have five lives, and they’ll lose a life every time something is out of position, which isn’t likely to happen with the first round (of five objects), but everything can quickly fall apart as you move to eight and then onto ten for the final round.

The real highs that come from What’s the Best Thing? come in the meta gameplay. When players try to fix a misranked situation by saying stuff like ‘Well, I know Jared likes Cucumber, but I’m PRETTY SURE he likes it less than I like The Pyramids’. That and the moments that immediately follow the reveal, when everybody is full of reaction in finding out that somebody really, really likes blobfish.

There are, however, a couple of weak points here. For a start, when you say something’s good, do you say it’s Number One? Ranked First? Or do you say that it’s ten out of ten? This comes up an incredibly amount once you start ranking things numerically. In addition to that, what’s the difference between a six out of ten and a four out of ten? If you end up with a sequence of sevens or fives then it’s simply not very exciting. Some of the topics, too, are a little trickier with strangers as rankings are, well subjective. I’d imagine strangers playing will likely wipe out, while couples may well clear the three rounds with only minor issues.

Some of these issues could have been fixed by having a set sized board that gets pieced together, rather than simply a ‘Best’ and ‘Worst’ standee… that, or even putting ’10!’ next to the word best and ‘1!’ to the word worst.

What’s the Best Thing? is a fun, compact twist on icebreakers, and it can technically be scaled to almost any player count.

What’s the Best Thing? is available now from Zatu Games.