Mean Girls: The Party Game - That's So Fetch!

Which mean questions will you answer about your fellow players? This party game is all about answering some mean and some not-so-mean prompts.

Published by Big Potato Games, Mean Girls: The Party Game is designed for 4-8 players and has a playtime of roughly 20 minutes.

Gameplay

Question cards equal to the number of players, minus one, are dealt out to the center of the table. Each player takes a sheet and writes their name on it. You pass the sheets around the table. When you get a sheet, you check which questions have not yet been answered on it, and then can write an answer for one unanswered question. Question examples are ‘what does their face smell like’ and ‘what do they wear on Wednesday’.

Once all the questions have been answered on all the sheets, players take turns. On your turn, the player to your right will read out all the answers on your sheet. You will then pick your favorite answer and try to guess who wrote it. The player who wrote it scores a point, and if you correctly guessed who wrote it you also score a point. The player with the most points after all the sheets have been read, wins the game.

Review

Mean Girls: The Party Game is easy to teach and learn, and the point system is straightforward. It is fun to try to guess who came up with an answer, particularly when it’s a bit of a tricky one. It’s also an enjoyable mechanism that you get to pick which question to answer from those still available on the sheet you’re handed.

There is definitely a range of questions, with some more innocuous than others, but many of them definitely just invite meanness. There can certainly be humor that is a playful poking at each other, and the rulebook does in fairness warn you against getting too mean, but the mechanics themselves just push you towards the line of what is okay,. When the entire game is about making (at best) teasing comments about others, it feels invariable that you’re going to cross those lines during the course of the game.

Because of these factors, this is very much a party game that you want to be very, very sure of your group before bringing it to the table. You want to play this with people with whom you know what will be going too far, making this a bad party game to play with strangers or people you don’t know that well, which feels like a poor fit for this genre of game in general.

The theme is also pretty niche and little to no explanation is given. A lot of people will know the movie this game is based on, but it does feel like it could have been made a little more accessible for players not familiar with it. Even the rules heavily reference the film.

This game didn’t land very well with us, but as stated, it’s all about knowing your audience and group. There are going to be people who enjoy the humor and the silliness and the creative bent of the answers they have to come up with and the flexibility that the questions give them.

Pros: Point system is very straightforward, it’s fun to guess who wrote each answer, ability to choose which of the available questions you want to write an answer for

Cons: Some players will find it too mean, easy to hurt people’s feelings while playing, does not do a good job of presenting its theme

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