I don’t actually have a lot of time to play party games. Maybe it’s not that I don’t have a lot of time, but I rarely have the right situation for them. My game group usually meets on a Wednesday, and it’s me and two other people. The same two people who have been meeting every Wednesday for almost a decade now. Every now and then there’s a bigger event where maybe up to five people show up, but regardless, party games are not part of my regular repertoire. So when people ask me what the best party games are, I actually come up blank. I don’t know what’s new and interesting and good in the party game scene these days. Which is why I was so excited to discover Poetry for Neanderthals and how much fun it can be.

In Poetry for Neanderthals, players break up into two teams. On one team’s turn, one player will be designated as the poet, and they will have a stack of cards with a bunch of objects or concepts that they need to get the rest of their team to say. The twist is that the Neanderthal poet can only speak in one-syllable words. A one-minute timer is set, and the goal is to get through as many cards as possible. The other team is tasked with watching and bopping the poet if they ever use a word that is more than one syllable.

It’s surprisingly fun trying to communicate with only one-syllable words. It’s hilarious when someone gets a word like “ankle” and they stammer and stutter before finally saying, “where foot meet leg.” And that moment when you get it, that moment when you sync up with the poet, it feels like you are mad geniuses decrypting a puzzle. Of course, the alternative is when you are just so out of sync and the poet is trying desperately to lead you to where you need to be. For example, drift ended up being a stone wall that wasted one teams entire turn. The poet was saying, “boat move wrong. Float far bad.”, which makes a crazy kind of sense when you understand the context. But when you don’t, you just sit there and stare at your teammate incredulously. And it’s in that moment when you learn that the person you’re talking to, the person you’re trying to lead to the word drift has never stepped foot on a boat before. They have no context for what a ‘bad float’ is. it turns out that they’re a car engineer and if you had gone with “car turn too fast, small spin” they would have shouted drift in milliseconds that makes you burst out with a belly full of laughter.

There are rules for keeping score and how to end the game and who wins and who loses, but I have always been of the opinion that those things, those rules, don’t make party games better. The point of party games is to engage your friends and to create laughter, and just playing *Poetry for Neanderthals* does that very well. It makes people laugh. It makes people exclaim when they get the right answer. It makes people debate on whether a permit should be along the same lines as a driver’s license as opposed to a construction permit. And honestly, those moments are the game.

Poetry for Neanderthals is very simple to play. Everyone knows what one-syllable words are, and yet it’s surprisingly hard to keep yourself from using a two-syllable word because a two-syllable word might be exactly the perfect thing you need to say. But you need to figure out a way around it, and then inevitably, when you slip up, you get a playful bop on the head with an inflatable club. At the end of the day, it’s exactly what I want my party game to be: light, fun, casual, and something that makes people laugh. All I should really say here is: game very good time.