Bish Bash Bosh
- Board's Eye View
- Aug 4
- 2 min read
Designed by Stephen Wilson and published by Ginger Fox, Bish Bash Bosh is an easy-to-play family-friendly card game for 3-6 players where the object is to be the first player to shed all their cards.
Players are dealt a hand of 7 cards (10 each in a three-player game). The cards will all display words ending with the sounds ISH, ASH or OSH. One player starts by playing a card to the shared discard pile with an ISH word ending and the next must follow with an ASH and the player after them must play an OSH card. In each case you have to call out the word when you play it. If you dither for more than 5 seconds, if you can't play a card that follows with the next sound, if you play the wrong card or if you forget to call out the word, you have to pick up a number of cards from the draw pile depending on the number shown on the card on top of the discard pile.
If that were all there was to the game it would be just an overly simple luck-of-the-draw party game but there is more to it. Whenever you play an OSH card, you point to the player who must lead with the next ISH card. Since play ordinarily goes clockwise, it'll usually be in your best interest to pick the player to your immediate right but that will mean you'll be required to follow them with an ASH card so you won't want to nominate them if you don't have an ASH card in your hand. Of course, if you nominate the lead to a player other than the one to your immediate right, other players may infer from that that you don't have a card that lets you follow an ISH... Optimising your choice of starting player may call for some quick calculations. And Bish Bash Bosh has some educational value too; encouraging word recognition when played with younger children.
You can up the difficulty level by shuffling different colour cards in the deck. These can optionally be played out of turn (ie: they let you jump in to play the next card of that colour in the sequence before the player whose turn it is plays their ordinary ASH or OSH card). There's even a sneaky SQUASH card. That word is spelt with an ASH ending but it's pronounced as an OSH so that's what it counts as, but you can also play it in immediate response to a SQUISH card, bypassing the need for an ASH.
We're not sure whether it's despite or because of its simplicity but we've had a lot of family fun playing Bish Bash Bosh.