Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
During my visit to SPIEL 2022, I had the chance to try Rankster, a very light party game that I covered in one of our “First Take Friday” articles. At the time, I thought it was interesting, and when I got the chance to get a copy of the final game for review recently from our partners at Asmodee, I raised my hand.
The game hasn’t changed at all. In both cooperative and competitive formats, a player is selected as the judge who will display three famous characters—both real-world and fantasy—on the table, from a deck of about 200 different choices. Then, they will reveal a question.
Let’s say the three characters, known in the game as Nominees, are Lady Gaga, Barack Obama, and Don Vito Corleone, from the movie The Godfather. The judge reads a question: “Who would have the best Halloween costume?”
Then the judge secretly places their vote for who they believe would make the best, second-best, and third-best costume by placing their one, two, and three cards next to the appropriate Nominee. In competitive mode, teams would then place their ranking cards next to the people they think the judge would nominate as having the best costume, in rank order. Then there’s a reveal, and points are scored, and people laugh.
I put Rankster in front of two different groups for this review, following up on my initial play in Germany a few years ago. I have to say…Rankster didn’t hold up, for the reason you probably guessed during the prompt above. With very rare exceptions, everyone always ranks the Nominees the same way, leading to almost no drama in each round.
Houston, We Need More Rankings
Lady Gaga, a pop star famous in part for her outrageous on-stage costumes, was probably your #1 answer to the prompt above. While there might be some drama between Obama and Vito Corleone for the second and third spots, players in my game all agreed that Obama would likely have the better costume.
Other prompts in my plays ended in similar fashion. Who would travel the farthest for a great meal?
- James Bond
- George Washington
- Gandalf, from The Lord of the Rings series
Gandalf, known literally for traveling great distances to help save those friendly Hobbit characters, was our easy pick for #1, although there was some discussion about how much Bond travels to take out threats to the global economy. But everyone went with C, then A, then B.
Who would you ask to pick up your kids from school?
- Emmanuel Macron (the President of France)
- Frankenstein’s Monster
- Freddie Mercury (the lead singer from the band Queen)
Macron was the easy #1 here. By most accounts, Freddie Mercury would not be a person I want picking my kids up from school…but, I’m taking Mercury 10 times out of 10 over an actual monster. So, everyone’s rankings here were A, then C, then B.
Rankster’s big issue certainly isn’t the rules overhead; this can be taught to nearly any human over the age of 10 in about 60 seconds. It comes in a cute box and even allows for ChatGPT to serve as an opponent if you have less than four players.
Rankster’s big issue is that it is too easy. And in an ocean of great word association party games, Rankster ranks well below the rest because it is so easy to score points.
Now, one idea to shake this up—make players rank, say, five or seven Nominees instead of just three. Maybe then you have something, especially in terms of great debate at the table. But we have games like that already, in the form of something like Top Ten or Ito. In fact, I did a play of Ito at a friend’s birthday party recently, and the beauty of that design is how hard it is, leading to loads of comic debate.
Rankster was initially a lot of fun, and in the right group where no one cares about the difficulty, maybe this might shine. But Rankster has not aged well and it quickly became a game that I won’t table again.
Rankster details
- Designer: Rikki Tahta
- Artists: Yan Moussu
- Publishers: GaGa Games, La Mame Games, Matagot
- Release Date: 2022
- Player count : 3 - 12
- Age range : 8+
- Time range : 15 - 30 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Cooperative Game, Deduction
- BGG Geek Rating: 6.59416 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Rankster.
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