That’s Not a Hat Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review That's Not a Hat, a party game published by Ravensburger. That's Not a Hat is an easy to play game that can be played with any group.

Have you ever wanted to see how good of a memory your fellow board gamers have? And also have the opportunity to tease and ridicule when they forget things? That’s essentially this small box party game for 3-8 players, That’s Not a Hat.

There are some staple games in my collection I consider among the best “silly” party games: Happy Salmon, Telestrations, Time’s Up, etc. But I can always use more options so let’s see if this is worthy of a place among my favorites.

To set up the game, everyone will get a card with an item on it, placing it face up in front of them. These are generally everyday items… a key, a pizza, a shoe… whatever. The first player will then draw the first card off the deck, revealing that item (let’s say it’s a strawberry) and passing it either left or right based on the arrow on the back of the card. They will also announce what they are passing, “Here, I’ve have a strawberry for you.”

Pretty simple… right? Well, the recipient of the strawberry will turn it face down and gift their starting card to the left or right (again, based on what the card indicates for direction). “Have this pizza!”

The pizza recipient will then pass whatever card they had and so on. Once a card has been passed and turned face down it is never turned back up. As you can imagine, it won’t take long for someone to not be entirely sure where every item is at. If you are receiving a gift and you don’t believe it is actually what the gifter claimed it to be, you can say “That’s not a ___!” and decline the gift. If you are right, the gifter gets the card as a penalty and if you are wrong you take the card.

Then the person who got the point will draw a new card from the deck and chaos resumes until someone has taken three cards. The player(s) with the fewest points win.

Is this game just Memory? Kind of.

Definitely, the key mechanism