Slippery Slopes

Slippery Slopes is a quick party game about communicating secret words by grading them on funky scales.

On your turn, you get a random set of “sliders”. For example, one between HOT and COLD, or one between YOUNG and OLD. It’s your job to mark your word on these sliders, such that the other players can guess what your secret word was.

• Easy example: the word grandpa would probably rank high on “young-old”.
• Medium example: where the word “broccoli” ranks on “disgusting-delicious” depends on the active player.
• Hard Example: where would you rank “house” on the scale of “humble-arrogant”!?

That’s … the whole game. I told you this was a simple party game ;)

Although there are, as always, expansions to keep things interesting for a long time.

What’s special?

I keep saying this, but this might be the game with the shortest rules I’ve ever made, even including expansions and remarks. When it comes to quick party games, shorter rules is obviously always better.

Almost everything about this game is generated on my website. The sliders are picked from a list of almost 100 options, manually collected by me. The background waves in the design are just a sine wave sampled by the computer. Only the action icons (the first expansion) were hand-drawn, and therefore have a fixed non-randomized look.

It’s also the first time that I iterate on an idea in a more conscious and obvious way.

What do I mean by that? Last year, I published That’s Amorphe and That’s Amorphe Pictures. Both are party games with a similar core idea, but executed in a different way. This game idea was literally created when I thought about what I’d learned from making That’s Amorphe and how I could improve on that.

On the other hand, most of my games so far have been standalone or only very loosely inspired by some other game I made 5 years prior.