Herd Mentality

Could you predict what the majority of your family and friends would say the best ice-cream flavour was? This prediction mechanic is the basis of Herd Mentality from Big Potato games, and it has to be said it is surprisingly a lot of fun.

It’s a really straightforward concept that’s immediate to grasp and that’s its main success – there are no barriers to this game.

If there’s a majority answer, then each player receives a cow token. The first to collect eight tokens wins the game. If a single player writes an answer that doesn’t match anyone else’s then they take ownership of a squeezy soft pink cow (a pig cow?). Whilst holding the pink cow a player cannot win the game (even if they collect eight tokens first), until another player provides a unique answer, and the ownership is transferred.

It’s a neat additional rule that you hope hinders early leaders in the game as they regrettably provide a unique answer.

The other fun addition is that the rules encourage “moo”-ing at players who are taking far too long to write their answer down. This provides a joyous periodic soundtrack as the tardy straggler invariably hurriedly fluffs their answer to silence the bovine chorus. It’s also guaranteed to unsettle others and get your bill delivered quicker if playing at the pub or in a restaurant.

The suggested player age is 10 or above, but even kids 2-3 years younger can easily participate by just getting them to say their answer before anyone else to save them having to struggle with writing it down. Any infrequent, culturally tricky questions – “Name the best character in Friends?” for example, can easily be skipped and a new card selected.

Setup is minimal – space for a cardboard paddock which holds the scoring tokens and a pen and pad of paper each.

It’s perhaps a bit overpriced for what you get in the box in comparison to other games of a similar price point. Fortunately, the high fun factor makes you overlook this minor negative.

Well worth noting too that this game can easily be played at a social distance, or even remotely across video call should we find ourselves in subsequent covid lockdowns.