What I love about publisher Horrible Guild is that they do not feel tied down to one kind of game. They published the legacy roleplaying game The King’s Dilemma. They published the Railroad Ink roll and write series. And in 2021, they did a Kickstarter for Soundbox – which is a party game. Think charades, but much louder.

In Sound Box, players are working as team to guess different sounds that are listed in front of them on the table. But, of course, it’s not that easy. One player is the guesser and they are blind-folded. Other players are then randomly assigned numbers corresponding to the cards on the game board. Note – not all the cards will be assigned!

Then a timer is set for 15 seconds and everyone must make their sound. At the same time.

The more sounds the guesser can assign to each person correctly, the better the teams score and you move up the track, unlocking more sounds while moving closer to victory. Fail to guess the correct sound or match it to a player, and your hearts go down.

It’s delightfully chaotic. Here is a sample below (my friends’ identities hidden because they would never play with me again if I upload an actual video of this):

The game has marked the “family friendly” cards in the deck as there were a few that made my friends blush (honeymoon immediately got put into the “no” pile) so you can quickly pull them out for work or with kids. The Kickstarter came with some special packs of sounds, the one I was most drawn to was the “gamer” noises that reference well-known video games.

I can’t wait to break this one out again! Might even be a great one for the office party (after pulling out a few choice cards and setting them aside) but it’s a wild time and you are guaranteed to end up laughing the whole time.