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Writer's pictureBoard's Eye View

Sell Outs

Sell Outs from Bad Kerning is a pitching party game pure and simple. It's ostensibly a 3-10 player game but it's best with at least five players and you can readily push the player count above seven. The suggestion in the rules is that you play sufficient rounds for everyone to be the customer three times but you could find that makes for an overlong game. As with similar pitching and storytelling games, you'll find it's more about the fun activity than about keeping score so the most important thing is to avoid the game overstaying its welcome.



Sell Outs comprises three decks of cards: Problems, Products and Features. Each round, one player is the customer - drawing a Problem card. We found it improved the game if the customer had a touch more initial agency so as a a small variant we had the customer draw two Problem cards and pick one of them. The other players all have three Product and five Features cards. They choose a Product and a Features card, and another Feature is added at random from the deck. Players then pitch their Products and Features to the customer, who chooses the best (almost certainly the funniest) and awards them the Problem card.



That's the game in a nutshell. It's not hugely different from other pitching and storytelling games like Pitchstorm (Skybound) and WLTM (Ingenium) but, unlike the latter, Sell Outs is unlikely to alarm your HR Dept. as being NSFW (Not Safe For Work). Like Snake Oil (Out of the Box Publishing) Sell Outs is notionally about salesmanship and you must expect players to be inventive as they pitch their Products and their Features. There's no guarantee therefore that a player won't stray into areas that might cause offence - especially as this is a game that's inevitably played primarily for laughs - but the cards themselves are creative but mostly innocuous. And there's certainly no shortage of cards: the game comes with 50 Problem cards, 125 Product cards and a whopping 275 Feature cards!


The Features card added randomly to each pitch is obviously intended to push players' inventiveness but, in our plays at Board's Eye View, some of our team found the random cards frustrating. This isn't a game which designers Sean Teevan and Alexander Daise intend to be taken too seriously so if you find you dislike the random cards don't use them - maybe instead play two or more Features cards from your hand.


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