This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Gift Trap
Designer: Nick Keller
Year: 2006
Country: U.K.
Publisher: GiftTRAP Enterprises
Gift Trap is a very seasonally appropriate party game in which you win by choosing the right gifts for your friends and also by being obvious about what sort of gifts work for you. It won a special Spiel des Jahres prize in 2009, and no wonder as it was quite fun.
The game features four decks of increasingly extravagant gifts, from a ballpoint pen to a trip on a private jet. Each round, you lay out gifts from one of the decks. Each player distributes the gifts to the other players so that the recipient won’t know which gift they got. Then each player places preference tokens on top of the gifts on the board, indicating which ones they like and which one they don’t.
After this, the gifts are revealed. If the gift and the preference token match, both the giver and the receiver receive points on their respective tracks. If the gift results in a mismatch, points are lost.
The two tracks, one for giving gifts and the other for receiving, are extremely simple, yet in our (mostly sober) playthrough we got constantly confused about which token to move when. This may also have had to do with the mentality you have when playing a party game. You’re laughing, joking, not paying attention, and thus fail to use even simple systems correctly. When you play a serious eurogame, you’re so focused, you use complex systems with flawless precision.
The fun in Gift Trap is in knowing your friends. In our game, players knew each other fairly well, and even minute knowledge became highly valuable. For example, one gift on the board was an eye test. I put it as a fave because I need to go for a test, and another player correctly guessed it would be a welcome gift because we’d talked about eyesight. (Why is the text in boardgames so small?) I made a mistake with another player following the same logic because I didn’t know she had just gone to the eye test, making another test unnecessary.
With other gifts, you just have to take a guess and hope for the best, like in real life.
The coincidences created by the system provide a lot of comedy. It’s funny when suddenly everyone decides on their own to give the same gift to someone, as the pattern feels like it reveals something about your lives without being too personal.