I’m not going to bury the lede here. It’s a special moment when I play a game with my wife at our local board game café and she immediately grabs a copy off the shelf to bring home. Things in Rings is that game.

Designed by Peter C. Hayward and published by AllPlay in 2024, Things in Rings is basically Venn Diagrams: The Board Game. One player takes on the role of the mastermind, or the “Knower”, while everyone else is trying to figure out the hidden logic by dropping clue cards into the appropriate intersections of coloured yarn circles.

Perhaps that description on its own doesn’t sound all that interesting, but believe me when I say that Things in Rings is simply a delight.

Each of the rings corresponds to a different aspect of the words. The yellow circle has to do with the makeup of the word itself, things like which letters are present in the word. The blue circle has to do with attributes of the thing, usually something physical about it. The red circle focuses more on context, like where you might find the item represented on the card.

Gameplay has non-knowing players laying one of the item cards from their hand into the Venn diagram where they think it belongs. As more items get laid into the diagram, theoretically, the more clues you’ll have to help determine where your future cards should go.Then the Knower either confirms that the player was correct, in which case, they get to play again, or, the Knower shakes their head disapprovingly and moves the card to the correct intersection. The player draws a new card, and the next player takes their turn. The goal of the game being to shed all the cards from your hand.

I realize this concept is a little hard to visualize in the abstract, so imagine looking at a completed puzzle and considering everything in the blue circle. What does a guitar, a moose, a flamingo, and a belt all have in common?

You might be thinking that they all have holes, but then you have to ask yourself: why isn’t the button in that blue circle too? What do the carpet, button, and guitar have in common that the belt doesn’t? If you’re holding a card showing a teapot, is that more like a guitar, or more similar to a belt?

At first, figuring out where to put your cards is almost an exercise in futility. There are so many things that a thing could be that you’re largely just placing cards based on vibes. But after everyone has had two or three rounds and items start to congregate within each section of the Venn diagram, and you begin to intuit where certain things should go. You might not be able to explain exactly what the criteria are, but you can start making educated guesses. If a cow goes in one particular spot, then a moose is pretty close to a cow in attribute and context, so that feels safe. You stop solving the categories directly and start reasoning by association, which feels surprisingly satisfying.

Now, you can play Things in Rings two different ways. One has all players competing against each other while the Knower simply facilitates where things go. The way I prefer to play, however, is the cooperative variant. In the cooperative game, the Knower has ten cards of their own while every other player has five. The goal is for the group to collectively play all of their cards before the Knower runs out of theirs.

I enjoy this version much more because I really appreciate the communication between players. The discussions, assumptions, and suggestions about what each category might be are more fun than sitting in silence hoping you’re the smarty-pants at the table before your dumb friends figure it out too.

Having a cooperative spin on Things in Rings also makes being the Knower kind of agonizing. Often you’ll have to make judgment calls. Like, if a category is “flammable,” then, is a flamingo flammable? What about a school? Is anything flammable if you try hard enough? It’s these moments that make sorting cards into their correct spots just a little bit painful. You worry about how judgmental your friends will be once the categories are revealed. If you’re playing cooperatively, you also worry about how badly you’re misleading everyone by arbitrarily deciding one way or the other when these weird edge cases come up.

Like all the best party games, the score here doesn’t really matter. Winning and losing isn’t the point of playing Things in Rings. Instead, you get to revel in the unknown. You get to spend twenty minutes trying to figure out what a flamingo, a guitar, and a belt possibly have in common. Then, at the end of the game, the Knower reveals the categories and everyone gets to see just how close they were, or wonder how they somehow missed what now seems like an obvious connection. The moment of the reveal, when everyone goes “OOOOOHHHHH, DUUUH!” is something I absolutely relish. And Things in Rings excels at delivering that moment.

Depending on who you play with, the game can occasionally drag on. Some people become completely paralyzed by indecision. If they can’t definitively place a card correctly, they freeze up and don’t want to place anything at all. That’s tough because Things in Rings really rewards people who are willing to take a shot and see what happens.

I said it at the beginning, but this game feels pretty special. It’s rare that my wife and I can go to a board game café, learn a game, play it once, and then have her pick up a copy on the way out because she loved it that much. Usually games need to marinate for a while before either of us decides they’re worth bringing home. But not this one. We played Things in Rings in public, laughed our way through trying to figure out bizarre connections between random objects, and by the time we were leaving the cafe, my partner had already decided that a copy was coming home with us.

That’s probably the strongest recommendation I can give a game.