PLAYED FOR YOU

Snake Oil

Successful Salesmanship

Despite being a real product that was used in the 19^th century by Chinese workers for an embrocation, Snake Oil has – due to faked, useless products – become a synonym for worthless plunder and Snake Oil Salesman a synonym for dishonest, fraudulent sales people.

The game features word cards showing words like „Tofu“ or „Future“ or „Remote“ or Wok“ and also double-sided customer cards with job descriptions like Hitch Hiker of Hunter or Vampire or Priest. Players in turn assume the role of customer, draw one customer card and choose one of the jobs. The other players hold six word cards each and have about 30 seconds to create a product that could be of interested to the current customer, using two of their cards. In clockwise order each player has a period of 30 second to pitch his product to the customer; the customer can stop a pitch that takes longer than 30 seconds. When the customer has heard all offers he gives his customer card to the player whose pitch/product he thinks was best.

All players now discard the two cards used in the pitch and fill their hand up to six cards; the player to the left of the customer becomes the new customer. When all players have been customer one, you win with most customer cards; in case of a tie you play one more round with only the players in the tie participating and the player with the next-most cards being customer.

Witty, funny, challenging, a game suited to people talking nineteen to the dozen and for sales wizards – and playable despite being in English, many of the words are generally known. Doesn’t’ a remote gun sound interesting for a gangster?

Players: 3-10

Age: 10+

Time: 30+

Designer: Jeff Ochs, Patricia Hayes Kaufman

Artist: John Kovalic, Patricia Hayes Kaufman

Price: ca. 20 Euro

Publisher: Out of the Box 2013

Web: www.otb-games.com

Genre: Words, creativity

Users: With friends

Special: Many players

Version: en

Rules: en

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Rules on the side of the box bottom

Can also be played in German

Needs creativity and imagination

Lots of fun to play

Compares to:

Apple to Apple and other games evaluating phrases or sentences

Other editions:

Snake Oil LLC

Chance (pink): 0

Tactic (turquoise): 0

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 3

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 3

Interaction (brown): 0

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0