If you read that then you already know some of the problems I have with the hit party game that took over game nights for several years. Game of Ham by Bill S. Naim falls into the latter camp. Game of HAM — HAM is an acronym for Hating All Mankind but the cover of the game features a pig holding a cooked ham — follows the CAH gameplay model where one person the judge plays what the game calls a Prompt card, and everyone else plays a Trick card. So if your party-game attendants are not comfortable with racier topics this might not be the game for you.
One of my complaints about CAH was that it never really ended. Game of HAM does try to solve that problem by adding a board that has a start and finish line. Note there are four, two-sided square boards, so you can mix-and-match them, making the game shorter, longer or just to add some variety.
Besides the Prompt and Trick cards, there are Colored cards that relate to the game board and give you one-time powers such as swapping out Trick cards or playing multiple off them on one Prompt. Game of HAM is in many ways a souped-up and reformed CAH in an attempt to make it more of a game than an activity, which is both good, bad, and great. The good part is that using the boards gives the game a definite ending. The great part is that many of the Prompt cards are a bit more freeform than CAH.
Like CAH , the art of Game of HAM is not inspiring, though the iconography and text is clear and the quality of game materials is fine. The group I played with preferred just playing Game of HAM without using the game boards and additional rules. Game of HAM is a humour, card-playing party game for 3 to plus players that plays more than 30 minutes. It is designed by Bill S. Naim, who also did the art. You can access their website here. Growing up in Toronto, Matt was fed a steady diet of gin, rummy, cribbage, along with Monopoly and Balderdash.
Over the past 10 years he has worked in journalism, editing, writing and designing pages for a variety of print publications. He spends most of his spare time playing any board game he can get his hands on, whether it's a quick minute filler game or a five-hour epic.
