Sounds Fishy party game review

When you hear something you can’t quite believe, you say it “sounds fishy”.

And that’s exactly what you’ll be saying while playing Sounds Fishy from Big Potato Games.

That’s because most of the stuff you’ll hear will be completely made up!

The game reminds us a lot of Balderdash and Beyond Balderdash, where players make up answers to factoids.

However, Sounds Fishy is much easier and quicker to play and is packed with more interesting facts that leave players scratching their heads.

The goal in this party game is to get the most points by choosing the fake answers and avoiding the real one.

In the game, players take turns being The Guesser.

Prior to each turn, the fish are randomly distributed to the other players face down. Each player will secretly look at their fish and see if they have a Red fish (Red Herring) or a Blue fish (Blue Kipper). There will be only 1 Blue fish in the group.

On their turn, the Guesser takes a question out of the card holder and holds it up so they see the question on one side of the card and all the other players see the question plus the answer on the back side of the card. The Guesser reads the question aloud and the other players will see the question and the answer (in bold blue).

The Guesser gives all the players about 15 seconds to think of an answer and then, going clockwise, each other player says their answer to the question.

The player who has the Blue Kipper says the correct answer and all the players with a Red Herring give a fake answer.

The goal is to fool the Guesser.

So if you have the Blue Kipper, you want to give the correct answer in such a way that the Guesser thinks it might be fake. And if you have a Red Herring, you want to deliver your answer like it’s the real thing.

Once all players have given their answer, the Guesser starts flipping over fish – trying to eliminate the fake answers.

They choose one of the answers they think is fake and flip over that player’s fish. If it’s Red, the Guesser gets 1 point. The Guesser can stop at any point and bank their points or they can keep guessing. However, if they flip over the Blue fish, they lose any points they’ve gained this round.

If the Guesser eliminates all Red Herrings and only has the Blue Kipper left, they also get an extra point.

For all players other than the Guesser, the scoring is a bit different – but very tied to their objectives.

If you have a Red Herring and it gets flipped, you get 0 points. If yours remains unflipped, you get 1 point for every flipped fish (including the Blue Kipper).

If you have the Blue Kipper and it gets flipped, you get 1 point for every unflipped fish on the table. If you remain unflipped, you get 0 points.

Then play passes to the next player to be the Guesser for the next round. The fish are again randomly dealt out face down and the new Guesser starts out with the next card in the card holder.

Play continues until everyone has been the Guesser either 1 or 2 times (depending on the number of players). Then players total their points and the player with the most points wins.

Can the whole family enjoy Sounds Fishy?

Sounds Fishy is a quick and fun party game most everyone in the family will enjoy playing.

I say “most everyone” because it requires bluffing. And we know not everyone enjoys games with a bluffing element (including a couple in our family). The recommended age is also 10+ and we think that’s a solid point of reference as well.

Even though the game requires some creative thinking and delivery of your answers, they’re all really short answers and the game plays quickly.

Since I mentioned Balderdash and Beyond Balderdash earlier, we like Sounds Fishy much more. That’s because in the Balderdash games, players have to make up definitions for very obscure words. And that’s a tougher creative stretch than coming up with a quick answer for a point of trivia.

For example, would you rather make up a definition of Trichobezoar or an answer to “In 2018, a man from Australia tried to sue his boss for $1.8 million for doing what?”? Or, “What did the ancient Egyptians do when their cat died?”?

And we much prefer making up crazy answers to these trivia types of questions than obscure word definitions.

Up to 10 players can play Sounds Fishy and we’ve had fun playing at various play counts. The most we’ve played with is 9 people – and that was over a lunch break with my co-workers this week. The tricky part when playing with a lot of people is remembering what answers people give. That’s because they typically rattle them off in succession fairly quickly. So by the time you need to guess which are the wrong answers, you first have to try to remember what everyone has said (and how they said it).

You could ask people to repeat their answer, but we’ve found that can give away if they were faking or not. So we have a house rule that players can’t be asked to repeat what they said.

As such, we’ve enjoyed games with 6 or 7 players the most. Though it is pretty fun in a 9-player game to have the Blue Kipper and get your fish flipped first so you score 7 points while everyone else scores nothing.

Overall, Sounds Fishy is a fun, simple party game that even those who don’t like bluffing games in our family enjoy playing.

How does Sounds Fishy score on our “Let’s Play Again” game meter?

Sounds Fishy scores high on our “let’s play again” game meter. It’s such a simple game to play and there’s really not set up. To play back-to-back games simply turn in all your point chips and keep going round the table with more cards.

Or another way, is to simply keep playing. Who says you really need to end after everyone has had only 1 or 2 turns being the Guesser?

The questions are mostly so bizarre that we’re genuinely curious to just keep rattling through more of them. And since the game comes with 220 question cards, there’s plenty of fun to go.

Grab a copy of Sounds Fishy for your family.

We’d like to thank Big Potato Games for a review copy of Sounds Fishy.