Off Your Rocker!

Stratus Games is making a new party game about being a little bit crazy, or at least acting like it. In Off Your Rocker, you either play one of the patients with a strange quirk or the psychiatrist trying to figure out what the quirk is. They offered a preview to anyone who would review the game, and since I was already heading to MiniPenCon, I thought it could be a good chance to check the game out.

In the game, the psychiatrist leaves the room and the patients look at a card and pick one of the two options on it for the quirk. The multiple items per card is nice in case either the group doesn’t like the idea or they think something too similar has been done recently. Once decided, the psychiatrist comes back in and is allowed to ask each patient one question. These should be open ended to allow the quirk to be more prevalent. Once one question has been asked per player, the psychiatrist player gets to guess the quirk. If the guess is correct, the psychiatrist gets a point. If not, three minutes are put on the clock and the psychiatrist is allowed to ask anyone any questions. If the quirk is figured out within those three minutes, the psychiatrist gets a point. Otherwise, they don’t get anything for that round.

The patients on a count of three then point at the patient they think did the best job of portraying the quirk, aside from themselves. If a patient is pointed at, whether by one person or everyone, they get a point. The patient with the most fingers being pointed at them gets to be the next psychiatrist.

After one play, I think the game is a lot of fun. Obviously letting go of your inhibitions will help with this game, at least to a point. There are some quirks that are going to be a lot harder to portray or guess than others, and some quirks are just more fun than others to portray. Despite the rules, we found that a question to each patient while they could talk to each other helped make the game more fun and allowed the quirks to shine. The five players I taught the game to all seemed to enjoy it and I believe at least two of them will be backing the game on Kickstarter.

My concerns with the game are that some of the quirks are very similar. For example, I saw two cards where each patient’s responses had to start with a certain letter. Another example is the quirk where the patients think they are werewolves, and another quirk on another card is that the patients believe they are turning into monsters. While not the exact same, these are very similar. However, with 200 cards and 800 quirks, I think these concerns should easily be removed with the final product.

Overall, I like the game, and am backing it at the Crazy level, since I think the rest of the Stratus Games series look like they’re good games that would be welcome in my collection. If you’d like to see more details about the game and look at the options for getting a copy, please check out their site: www.oyrgame.com. The game is $20 if they raise enough money in the next two weeks, so get on board and start acting crazy!