Green Team Wins Review

January 10, 2024

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Following on with the party game theme started by Secret Identity earlier this week, it’s Green Team Wins. It’s a scientific fact that green is the best colour to choose in a board game. That said, if you take the green pieces before I have a chance to, there’ll be trouble. Green Team Wins then, was clearly designed just for me, which was a really nice thing for designer Nathan Thornton to do – to make a game just for me. It’s a party game, its really easy to learn, and it’s a ton of fun. You might need more than one copy though…

Playing to the crowd

The underlying concept of Green Team Wins is reading the room and choosing what you think the most popular answer will be. In each round, you’re given a prompt and you’re asked to write your answer down on your drywipe board. Prompts come in one of three types: Best of Three, where you choose the answer you think is the most popular, This or That, where you pick one of two options, or Fill in the Blank, where you’re given a word and have to fill in the associated word.

green team wins box content — What you can expect to get in the box.

An example is something like the Best of Three card “What flavor should green be?”. You’ve got a choice of Lime, Apple, or Watermelon as answers, so you pick the one you want and write it down. To reiterate the whole idea of the game, you’re not writing what you think should be the correct answer – which is clearly Lime – instead, you’re trying to guess what everyone else is going to write.

If you’re reading this thinking “This all sounds awfully familiar” there’s a chance you fall into one of two camps (or both). If you’re of a certain age, you might remember the TV game show Family Fortunes. “We asked 100 people what their favourite crisp flavour is… you said Hedgehog, our survey said…”

The other camp is folks from the UK who have played some of the excellent games from Big Potato Games, especially Herd Mentality, which is essentially the exact same concept, but in a game with a squishy pink cow. The titular Green Team is just a cardboard tile which each player has which governs scoring. You all start on the orange team side of the tile. When you answer, if you get the most popular, you flip it to the green side and get a point. If you were already on the green team, you get two points instead. Get one wrong, and you flip back to orange.

Party planning

There are a couple of things to bear in mind before you go racing out to buy a copy. Firstly is the number of players you’re planning to have battling wits. The original printing of Green Team Wins played up to 12 people, which is a good number for a party game. The current – and as I understand it from what 25th Century Games say here, all future printings – only supports up to six players.

Bear in mind that all I’m talking about here is the supplied materials in the box. You can play with as many people as you like if you supply paper and pens, but if you want the drywipe board and pens experience, you need more copies of the game to combine together. Not ideal, but not the end of the world.

example of a best of three card — How many UK homes have a basement?

I used to assume that most of my readers are from my side of the pond, but things have changed over the last year or two, and now I have twice as many US readers as UK!. So, howdy folks! The other potential sticking point is for us here in the UK. There are US-centric references in some of the cards that mean you might want to skip them. Filling in the missing word to go after the prompt ‘Candy’, for instance, doesn’t hit the same way over here.

Final thoughts

I was over the moon to find Green Team Wins in stock over here just before Christmas. It’d been on my wishlist for a long time, awaiting a new printing. I knew what I was getting, and it didn’t disappoint. My family had a great time over Christmas playing it on multiple occasions.

We had to throw in some Just One easels and make our own green team/orange team tiles when we played with more than six people, which works but just feels a bit disjointed. I think I may pick up a second copy so I can play up to 12 people at conventions and parties. I have Herd Mentality already (review here), which I love too, but it lacks the three categories of prompt cards.

If you’re in the UK and are finding it hard to get Green Team Wins, I recommend getting Herd Mentality. It’s worth it for the squishy pink cow alone, and it also supports more players out of the box. If you can get a copy for a decent price though, and if six players is enough for you, Green Team Wins is a must-have for your party games shelf. Hysterical stuff, highly recommended.