A cooperative game built on lateral thinking puzzles. Every card describes a situation that makes no sense. A man is found dead in a forest wearing full scuba gear, miles from the nearest ocean. One player holds the card and knows why. Everyone else asks yes-or-no questions until the whole room sees it too. In hindsight, the answer was almost obvious.
Almost Obvious plays on Stalefish Game Night. Open stalefish.tv on the TV, scan the code with your phones, and pick it from the list. The game has its own site too, at almostobviousgame.com.
How it plays
- The Guide’s phone shows the card’s solution and three clues. The TV shows everyone else the situation
- Everyone asks yes-or-no questions out loud, in any order. The Guide answers Yes, No, or Irrelevant
- When the sand timer runs out, the Guide can reveal the next clue
- Once it clicks, the solution goes up on the TV and the next phone becomes the Guide
No TV? One phone hosts, everyone else scans its code, and an AI Guide takes the questions on every phone.
Why it works
Nobody keeps score. The payoff is the click: the assumption you never noticed you were making falls away and the whole table groans at once. Some cards unravel in a minute. Others send the group down three wrong roads first. Two people can play. So can a living room of twelve.
The expansions
The base deck comes free with Game Night. Three expansions add their own kind of strange, each sold as a pack inside Game Night, or all three together as Volume 1:
- Extremities. Survival, pressure, and places nobody should be
- Perspectives. The answer depends on how you’re looking at it
- Consequences. Small actions with outcomes nobody can take back. This is the dark one: most of its cards end in a death, and Game Night shows a one-line warning when the pack goes in
Almost Obvious grew out of Outside the Box, a lateral thinking puzzle app Stalefish Labs shipped for the iPhone in 2009.
Format: Party game for a TV and phones, on Stalefish Game Night
Status: Playable now at stalefish.tv