Just One is a cooperative party game that took the Spiel des Jahres award – which has gone to a party game three times in the last five years – in 2019, despite some incredibly simple rules. There’s one real gimmick here, but otherwise it’s a very solid if not terribly novel word-guessing game that fits nicely on the shelf with the likes of Taboo, Codenames (the 2015 Spiel winner), and Werewords.
Just One’s ideal player count is 4 to 7, although there’s a tweak for playing with 3, and on each turn one of those players will be the guesser while all others will provide clues. At the start of the game, the players shuffle the deck and draw 13 cards, face-down, into a separate pile for that game. The guesser takes a card from the pile without looking, placing it on their personal easel facing away from them, and says a number from 1 to 5. Each card has five words on it, so the guesser’s number decides which word is the target for that particular round. Then every other player writes a single-word clue on their own easels, using dry-erase markers, and shows it to all other players except the guesser.
Why show it to other players first? If any two or more players wrote down the same clue, it’s invalid and those players must erase their words. The guesser only gets to see clue words that were unique, so it’s quite possible that you’d end up with zero clues and thus have no chance to guess at all, although I haven’t had that happen yet. The guesser has two choices – they get one guess at the target word, or they may pass. If they guess correctly, the team scores a point, placing that card into a separate pile. If they pass, the card is set aside with no gain or loss. If they guess incorrectly, however, they essentially lose two points, discarding that card plus the top card in the face-down pile or, if that pile is done, removing a card from the stack of successful cards.
The game ends when the thirteen-card pile is exhausted, after which players add up the cards in the success pile. Thirteen is a perfect score, although anything from nine and up is probably a successful game, although I think there’s a bit of a curve here where having more players makes it a little easier.
You can play with three players with one change to the rules: on each turn, the two players who are giving clues will give two words, on two separate easels, so that those players are comparing all four clues and will still eliminate any duplicates. This does alter the game quite a bit, because you can connect your two clues in certain ways – the rules don’t explicitly ban making the two words together into a single phrase or clue, although I think that’s against the spirit of the game, and you do risk having one or both clues eliminated if the other clue-giver has the same idea. It just opens up possibilities that aren’t there when you can only give one single-word clue.
That all makes Just One … just fine. It’s fun enough to play, especially when you have a lot in common with other players, so you’re likely to share experiences or associations with words, and thus can play into those but have to hope other clue-givers don’t remember the same incident or the same connection to which your clue refers. I do think party games work better when they’re competitive, and I think the word-guessing game has been done better by other designers, but I wouldn’t say no if someone asked to play this, and at under $20 it’s good value considering how many times you could conceivably play it.