Under the Bus

FOR FULL RULES, MATERIALS LIST, PHOTOS, AND OUR PROCESS, DOWNLOAD THE PDF

GAME DEVELOPED BY: 

Michelle Ehrhardt, Yang Li, Xin Hu and Shak'ar Mujukian

A school is a place where people come together to learn and make friends, right? Maybe in TV shows, but not in real life, and definitely not in this game! Come together with your fellow classmates, teachers, and staff to write nasty rumors and insult each other. At the very least? It’ll be one heck of a learning experience.

How to play

1. At the start of each round, players randomly draw from the role deck. This will determine their role for that round.

• Whoever draws the judge card sits out for that round. They will take part in scoring, which we will go over later. The other players will make sentences in that round.

2. After drawing, players reveal their role. Rounds start from the one who sits right to the Judge.

3. Next, players go in turns (clockwise) drawing their starting hand. To draw this hand, players each draw 2 cards from any deck that is not the character deck or role deck, and 1 card from the character deck.

4. To begin the game, players go in turns, each drawing one card from any deck (except the character deck or role deck) and placing 1 card from their hand on any matching square on the board.

• Character cards can only go in the first column on the board, verb cards can only go on the second column, and subject cards can only go on the third column.

5. The goal is to make complete sentences that insult other player’s roles, while also keeping your role from being insulted. These sentences can go in any direction, so long as they are complete (meaning grammatically correct).

6. Once the sentences are formed, the players then end the sentence phase and begin the scoring phase.

HOW SCORING WORKS:

• To score their sentences, players go in turns picking one sentence from the board to tell to the judge. Reminder: These sentences can be horizontal or diagonal, and can go from left to right, right to left, up to down, or down to up.
• Once the players have finished telling the judge the sentence they’ve picked, the judge chooses the sentence they find the most insulting and hands the player who was targeted by that sentence an insult token.

7. After scoring for the round is complete, discard all the verb and noun cards from that round. Then, reshuffle the character and role decks. Then, the judge from the last round will pass the judge card to the right. That player is the judge for the next round.

8. Replay the game from step 1 using these rules, but skipping the initial judge selection process. After 5 rounds, the player with the least insult tokens will become the winner. Ties are allowed.