[Ad- gifted product] Some Monday’s we are a bit pressed for time. That’s when smaller, ice-breaker style tabletop games come out and are perfect to play. That’s Not a Hat is all about bluffing what card you are currently moving to another person. We played as a family, with Dann, Amelia and Robin joining in while Kai played DND at our local Geek Retreat. The game itself was very easy to pick up and start with, which was ideal for our group.
At the start of the game, each player gets a card in front of them. The deck of cards then goes in the middle of the table, face up. On your turn, you need to pick up a card from the deck in the middle, which is called the Gift Shop. Everyone can look at this card before it is flipped to the back of the card, there is an arrow that shows what way this gift is going to go. Some cards have more than one arrow, so you can follow whichever one you want. You must then say “I gift you” and the name of the item you are gifting. The player who is getting the gift can either accept by saying Thank You or reject the gift. If they accept the gift, they must then place it in front of them, still face down, before flipping over their starting card and giving that to the player the arrow on that card is pointed too.
It’s not long before all of the cards are face down and nobody is really sure what gift is what. In That’s Not a Hat, if you feel that a gift you received is not the gift that was said, you will need to say “That’s not a” and then whatever gift was just said to you. If you were correct, the person who passed it gets the card in their discard pile. If you are wrong, it goes into your discard pile. Whoever gets the card will grab the next card from the gift shop and continue. Whoever has the most discarded cards at the end of the game has lost.
When we played That’s Not a Hat, we all had trouble remembering what our cards were, let alone what the cards were that other people had! It was fantastic fun as we shouted out saying cards weren’t what they said, just to reveal nobody really knew what they were. Robin, who is 8, has the most trouble remembering, so it might be best played with people all around the same age range, if you are taking it seriously. We don’t really do winners or losers in these types of games and just tend to play as long as we are having fun. That’s Not a Hat comes in a small box, which is also perfect for travel, and it works well as a starter game or a quick game between other activities that you might be doing. We had a lot of fun with it and found the simple designs of the objects to be very nice as well.