Perfect Mismatch
- Board's Eye View
- 12 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Designed by Alexander Peshkov, Perfect Mismatch is a party game from Ares Games and Red Cat where one player is giving clues to a word while the others are trying to deduce the word from the clues. It's a 'what am I thinking?', limited communication game where the clue-giver is randomly assigned one of the five words on a card and then gives clues to that word by positioning discs between different attributes.
If that sounds familiar it's because the idea of positioning between opposing conditions has been done before; notably in Wavelength (CMYK). But in Wavelength players are looking at the relative strength between two extremes: hot/cold, harmful/harmless etc. What distinguishes Perfect Mismatch is that the attributes that the players have to work with are entirely random and will in most cases be seemingly unrelated. There are 150 double-sided attribute cards and you'll randomly place five on one side of the board and five on the other. For their clues, the clue-giver has to allocate six discs abacus-style to the words in the arbitrary pairs that might be associated with the word they are trying to get the other players to guess. If the two words happen to be equally applicable or equally irrelevant, they might push three discs to each end.
The guessers know the five options from which the clue-giver was given one word, so they aren't just trying to second-guess the clue-giver because they may also be able to apply a degree of deduction to eliminate words that they reckon would've resulted in different disc allocations to those they've been given. Thence the skill of the game...
With 110 double-sided 'task' cards and the 150 double-sided attribute cards, Perfect Mismatch is almost infinitely variable. You can be pretty much guaranteed never to get the same combos in any replay of the game. Just occasionally you might randomly draw attribute cards that are on the same broad continuum but players will mostly be working with 'attributes' that aren't at all related; sometimes frustratingly so!
And there's further replayability because Perfect Mismatch can be played either competitively or as a cooperative game (and with two different ways of playing cooperatively). The Board's Eye View team have tended to favour the competitive mode. The clue-giver benefits from Dixit-like scoring; gaining a point for each correct answer. Play this way and there's a race element because the soonest a player places out their (face-down) guess, the more points they will score if they are correct. Wrong answers don't rob other players of points, however, because they are removed frm the scoreboard and correct answers moved up. Perfect Mismatch comes with scoring components for up to eight players but this versatile package can easily be extended to facilitate even higher player counts by the simple expedient of organising players into teams.
