Sell Me a Sasquatch

A card game about buying something you cannot fully see from someone with every reason to lie about it.

Exploding Kittens made this one with NPR's Planet Money, and it is a rare thing: a party game built on an actual piece of economics. Each turn one player is the Buyer. Everyone else assembles a deal for them — two cards face down, one face up — and the Buyer picks whichever they like the look of, hoping it is full of Creatures rather than Nasties. The face-up card is the only honest thing on the table, and it is there because you chose to put it there.

The twist that makes it work: if nobody takes your deal, you keep it. So you cannot simply load every offer with rubbish. A deal has to be tempting enough to be taken but bad enough to be worth losing, and getting that wrong lands the whole thing back in your own lap. The design is lifted from Akerlof's market for lemons — the used-car problem, where the seller knows what they are selling and the buyer does not — and it turns out to make a very good twenty minutes.

Fast, mean, and much cleverer than the box suggests. Two to six players, and it sharpens considerably at the higher counts where there are more deals to read.

Perfect for: Anyone who has ever bought something second-hand and known, at the moment of handing over the money, that they were being had.

2–6 players | 20 minutes | Age 10+