Voting

GiftTRAP won a special Spiel des Jahres prize in 2009, and was voted "Best Party Game of the Year" by Games Magazine in 2008, proving that while buying real gifts can be traumatic, giving virtual gifts to find out how people really feel is heaps of fun. Be prepared for some surprises! It's a conversation starter that will get you and your friends talking about things that matter. Unlike other party games you don't need skills in drawing, acting or trivia, so it works well when you have a crowd of mixed ages/skills. GiftTRAP is played over a series of rounds. Each round has the following steps: DEAL - deal random gifts from one of the 5 packs of gifts. Packs have similar monetary value. SHOP - think about how to match these gifts to the players. GIVE - give one of these gifts to each player (using gift tokens). GET - choose which gifts you want yourself (using get tokens: Ok, Good, Great & No Way). REVEAL - show people what you wanted and see what you were given by each player. SCORE - the giver and the receiver score for each gift (the giver gets GIVING points, the receiver gets GETTING points). The first to reach the end of both the Giving and Getting tracks is the winner.

Players represent various office holders in the ruling Junta. Depending upon his office and the various cards he holds, each player has a certain number of votes. These are important as they must first elect El Presidente and then vote on the budget that he proposes. Here's where it can get sticky. El Presidente draws cards face down from the money deck (which varies in denomination from $1 to $3) and must propose a budget for the year, distributing the money as he sees fit amongst the various offices. Of course, loyalty to him is usually rewarded, while those pesky "thorns in his side" are usually cut off completely. The beauty of all this, though, is that El Presidente can — and most always does — keep some of the loot for himself. And since no one but he knows the value of what he drew, no one knows how much he's keeping. Suspicion is always keen.

Players may attempt to assassinate the other players by guessing where they will be from among five locations. Players who successfully assassinate another player take that player's money, as the only safe money is the money that has been deposited in a Swiss bank account, and the only way to get to the bank is to survive the assassination round.

If the players are unhappy, and there is an excuse, they can call for a coup, where the opposition players seek to take control of a majority of the power centers. Rebel players control the forces of the role which they were assigned (e.g. army, navy, air force), and players loyal to El Presidente do the same, seeking to control the strongholds until the rebellion is quelled.

The goal is to amass the greatest wealth secreted away in your Swiss bank account.

Description from BoardgameNews.com:

While Cyrano de Bergerac was a real person, Cyrano is based on the play Cyrano de Bergerac, written more than two hundred years after Cyrano’s death. In both the play and the game, Cyrano writes poetry to woo a woman for another man. The game Cyrano lasts a number of rounds, and each round starts with a player revealing a theme card and two rhyme cards ("-aid", "-ed" and so on with homonyms being acceptable). Each player then composes a quatrain (a poem of four lines) with two of the lines ending with one of the rhymes and the other two ending with the other rhyme. Players read their poems and score points Boggle-style, with each unique ending word being worth one point; these points are recorded by blacking out squares on a ladder, which represents the lover’s climb toward his object of affection.

Everyone then secretly votes on which poem he or she most appreciated, whether for its beauty, adherence to theme, or some other artistic qualification. Players reveal their votes simultaneously, and for each player who voted the same way you did, you receive one point, with these points being recorded by the maiden’s descent from the tower. Whichever player first brings the loves onto the same floor of the tower wins, with ties being broken by a rhyming duel.

Before they can roll and move, players must pick a card and present the rest of the players with a nasty choice between two thoroughly unpleasant hypotheticals in categories such as pain, embarrassment, ethics, and ingestion. If the player guesses the majority preference, he gets to move otherwise he must pass. Some spaces allow the player to invent their own awful hypothetical choice. The other players vote secretly on their choice in this case. If the vote is not unamimous, the player can move or send someone else back. Players roll a six-sided die and there are only 10 spaces to the goal so games go very quickly. Typical choices on the cards include, "Would you rather lie naked in a bathtub full of live roaches or dive head first into a pool of tobacco spit?" The answer "neither" is NEVER allowed.

Variant:
The 2003 version of this game "Would You Rather?" appears to have quite different rules to the above described game. There is a new simpler square board with more spaces. Unlike the 20 minutes of the above game, 1-2 hours is recommended by the manufacturer. Players roll a dice, then move and depending where they land, draw cards with dilemmas to pose to the rest of the other players. The current player must try to secretly predict the result of the other players' subsequent open discussion and consensus view. No-one is penalised for an inability to reach consensus, the game encourages one option picked at random perhaps by flipping a coin, to keep the game moving. If the current player predicted correctly, they get a bonus turn.

Typical questions include "Would you rather ... On senior prom night, have to take your parent -OR- your 12 year old sibling?"

Every so often players get the opportunity to take a difficult challenge with the winner being the first person to complete their third challenge.

Your goal in What's It To Ya? (aka Oh, Really!) is to think like the crowd – or at least like your partner. Five item cards – such as "Hope", "Garbage Collectors", "Underwear", "Wisdom", and "Hearing" – are placed on the table next to letters A-E. Each player then secretly places rank cards in order based on which item is most important to her: "B" first since you don't want to live in filth, then "D" because being wise is next most important after a clean home, and so on.

Players then reveal their cards, showing all the cards in the first rank, then the second rank, and so on. Whichever letter appears the most in a position is the crowd favorite; those letters stay revealed, while all other letters are turned face-down again. Whichever player (or players) has the most cards revealed at the end of a round scores a point; if a player has all five cards revealed, she scores two points. Whoever scores seven points first wins.

WITY can also be played in teams, with one player on a team trying to match the ranking of the other member. Scoring is handled the same as in the group game, and the first team to earn seven points wins.