We’re a pretty musical family.  I’ve joked before that life at our house really is like a musical, because in our life we actually do break into spontaneous song and (sometimes) dance!  Our communication is frequently peppered with musical quotes.  (And movie quotes, but they aren’t relevant to this post.)  Sooo…this game caught my eye.

MIXTAPE: The Song and Scenario Card Game

First, to give you the basics, let me let you check out the box like you might if you were at the store.

The recommended age is 12 and up, and it calls for 3 players.  (Although you can probably get away with 2 if you don’t mind not playing by the rules, but I’ll get to that in a minute.)  As you might suspect from the verbiage on the box, some of the scenarios are more appropriate for an older audience than for children.  So far, we’ve come across very few of these.  They’d be easy enough to skip if you have Younger players.

In our experience with the game so far, the bigger difficulty with younger children is that they don’t have as broad a repertoire of songs.  If you have younger kids who know a lot of songs, you can probably go younger.  (We’ve played the “real” game with an 11-year-old, and have included the younger kids in some…off-label applications of the game.)  In terms of how “clean” it is, apart from those rare cards you might want to skip, the players will largely determine the flavor of the game.

MIXTAPE is Pretty Unstructured

This is a very unstructured game.  The box literally only contains cards.  The entirety of the instructions is what you see on the end of the box (shown above).

It calls for three players.  That is largely (I assume) so there’s someone to judge the winner and you don’t end up with a tie.  In reality, you can probably play with two if the two are honest types who will vote for the choice they think is best and not just their own.

More importantly, this is one of those games where the fun is in the playing, not the score-keeping.  You can totally just read through the cards and pick your best songs just for the fun of it and not worry about the rules.  In fact, this has become something of a dinnertime “thing” for us — kind of like discussion prompt cards.  The toddler has come to expect this “after-dinner” music so she can enjoy dancing. 

If you want to play Mixtape “for real,” be aware that there are also some “action cards” in the mix.  These might tell you to lip sync to the next song, to play air guitar with it, etc.  And the cards definitely do not come well-shuffled, because all the action cards are together in one big chunk.  Be sure to plan ahead to shuffle the cards well the first time.

The simplicity of this game is part of its beauty.  You will need some means to play the songs as you select them — whether that’s an Amazon Echo, a computer with internet access, a smartphone, or whatever.  Most of the time, most of us are near one of these things anyway, anymore.  Apart from that, you don’t need anything other than the card deck and your players.  You don’t even need room to spread out a game board.  (I’m thinking it could be super-handy to also stick a bit of self-adhesive dry erase film to the side of the box.)

This game from Breaking Games is a good party game, or a good family game for not-too-young families.

MIXTAPEBVLe Whiteboard DecalAll-new Echo Dot (3rd Gen) – Smart speaker with Alexa

MIXTAPE – the Game {review} is a post from: Titus 2 Homemaker

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