TETO
- Board's Eye View
- Sep 18
- 2 min read
Here's a party game from 2Tomatoes for 4-10 players that sounds as simple as it is silly. It is simple enough to explain and it is indeed silly, but it's nowhere near as easy to play as it sounds...
Players divide into teams. The game comprises a deck of 150 cards that show a consonant on one side and a list of six words on the other. The deck is positioned so that players can see the consonant, so it will only be the active player, who draws the top card from the deck, who sees the words on the card.
The active player has 30 seconds to try to communicate words from the card to their team mates by saying the word substituting the indicated consonant for all of the consonants actually in the word. So the TETO name of the game could, for example, mean hero, memo or zero. You're allowed, indeed encouraged, however, to supplement your annunciation of the word with gestures: so essentially TETO is charades with a verbal but not always very helpful clue.
Substituting a specific consonant for the other consonants in a word is easy peasy with words like hero, memo or zero. It's harder tho' in words with double consonants like cross or salmon: you'll find players trip over their tongues or fall into the trap of using the second consonant. It's even harder to avoid accidentally using the original consonants in a longer multi-syllable word like butterfly, where, with the added pressure of the timer, players find themselves making the substitutions for consonants at the start and middle of the word but failing to do so at the end. As you might guess, if a player uses a consonant other than the one on the card, their turn ends.
It makes for a fun party game, especially when the players have all had a few drinks, tho' more often than not you'll find the charade element is doing most of the work.
TETO is designed by Eugeni Castaño and Jorge J Barroso, and the words on the cards all come in English, Spanish and - unusually - in Catalan. As an added bonus then, this game can help English speakers to brush up on their Spanish (and Catalan!) vocabulary. We've already learned from other games that mariposa is the Spanish word for butterfly (papallona in Catalan) but we were intrigued to discover that the Spanish and Catalan word for alarm clock is despertador. The word makes it sound like our Iberian friends are desperately unhappy about being woken from their sleep.
