Monikers Game

Three Rounds, One Deck, Increasingly Ridiculous Results

By the third round, you're doing a full-body impression of Nikola Tesla while your teammates lose their minds trying to guess — and it works, because you spent round one planting the perfect hint. That escalating momentum is what makes Monikers genuinely different from every other party game on the shelf.

From CMYK, Monikers is a team guessing game built around a shared deck of cards featuring famous and historical figures — celebrities, historical icons, fictional characters, and the occasional delightfully obscure personality. The deck stays the same across all three rounds, which is the clever twist at the heart of the game. In round one, you can say anything you like to get your team to guess a name — anything except the name itself. Round two strips you down to a single word. Round three takes away words entirely, leaving you with nothing but charades. The callbacks and shorthand you build across rounds create an inside-joke energy that belongs entirely to your table.

Monikers is a natural fit for game nights where you want everyone in the room laughing within ten minutes. It plays well from four players up to a crowd, handles mixed ages gracefully, and requires zero prior hobby knowledge — if you know who Abraham Lincoln is, you're ready to play. It's a light game in the best sense: easy to explain, fast to get moving, and packed with personality. Plan on a session somewhere in the 30 to 60 minute range depending on your group size and how long you let the charades rounds run.

The card art carries CMYK's signature clean, graphic style, and the writing on the cards themselves is sharp — the hints and notes included for each figure reward players who dig in. The game shines brightest with a lively group who are willing to commit to the bit, and it has a deserved reputation as one of the most reliably fun party games in print.