Find the Lies Among the Truth in Party Game Sounds Fishy

Who are the red herrings and who has the one true answer? Guess correctly in this party game about fishy answers to unusual trivia questions.

Published by Big Potato Games, Sounds Fishy is a party game for 4-10 players in which one player tries to find all the incorrect answers while avoiding the correct one.

Gameplay

Each round, one player is the guesser. Everyone else gets a fish tile dealt to them face-down. The fish players peek at their tiles. One person is the true blue kipper, and everyone else is a red herring. The guesser draws a trivia question card and holds it up so that he can only see the front and all the other players can see the back. He reads the question aloud. Meanwhile, all the fish players can see the answer on the back.

Next, the red herrings have fifteen seconds to think up a fake answer to the question, while the blue kipper pretends to think of an answer. Then, all players announce their answers to the guesser. The guesser is trying to find the fake answers. One at a time, he flips over the fish tiles of the players he believes to be the red herrings. At any point he can choose to stop flipping and end the round. The guesser earns one point for each red hearing tile he flips and an extra point for flipping the blue kipper after he has flipped all the other tiles. If, however, he flips the blue kipper while there are still unflipped red herrings, he earns no points and the round is immediately over.

If you are a red herring player and are flipped, you gain no points. If you are not flipped when the round ends, you earn one point for every other fish tile that has not been flipped yet. If you are the blue kipper player and get flipped while there are still unrevealed red herrings, you earn one point for every unflipped fish tile still on the table.

A new player then becomes the guesser for the next round. The game ends after a certain number of rounds, and the player with the most points wins.

Review

Sounds Fishy is a fun, light party game. There’s an enjoyable range of questions, you learn random trivia facts, and as the guesser it's fun to try deciphering what sounds crazy enough to be true but not too crazy to be impossible.

For the fish, there is an interesting dichotomy of both wanting your answer to sound believable and delivering it in a way that could potentially be fake as the blue kipper player is trying to deliver his answer unconvincingly.

The core concept of the game, coming up with fake answers or trying to spot the real one, is pretty simple to grasp and you can be playing the game in two minutes or less. The scoring is a little complicated for such a straightforward game, but it doesn’t detract from the enjoyment.

We quite enjoyed the fish tiles. They’re nice and solid and large. Additionally, we appreciated that scoring tokens are included and these are also quite thick and shiny. There’s no easy way to fit everything into the box, however, and it’s a bit messy. The rulebook is also a little vague over what it considers to be a round: is it one guesser’s turn or is it after everyone has gotten to be the guesser? But since your game group can simply choose how long they want to play, this is only a minor issue.

Sounds Fishy has some things in common with other party games, but presents the ideas in a nicely-designed, streamlined, attractive package. It’s appropriate for a range of ages and game groups, and makes for an enjoyable, often funny, game night.

Pros: All roles are fun and have their own challenges, excellent component quality, easy to teach

Cons: Storage inside the box is not well designed, scoring is a little complicated

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.