Personality quizzes are mildly amusing for work or home life. Buzzfeed made half a company out of them. The You Quiz turns the personality quiz into a 3-8 player race up a staircase of questions to amuse the King, whose personality you are complimenting or assassinating. It’s a fast, frantic, and uniquely designed web device-style game that, with just one design choice, will either become overwhelming or intoxicating.
That design choice is that, unlike almost any other web-device game like Jackbox or Use Your Words, The You Quiz isn’t turn-based or round-based. The You Quiz plays in real time. Whilst you can turn on an option to force everyone to get the same set of questions, you’ll all be answering them in real time, sending letters with your responses up the King on the throne at the top of a staircase. The goal is to get either a thumbs up to ascend one step or a heart to ascend two steps. Once at the top, you’ll need to get a positive approval from the King on the last step to oust the King and take the throne for the next round.
The key here is the real-time aspect of The You Quiz. Each question requires you to type in your answer, and as everyone is doing the same, the order of submission is the order reviewed by the King. The more answers you send, the more likely you’ll do well, and that means ignoring everyone else’s answers. This means The You Quiz is uniquely fast-paced and potentially quite stressful. There’s no moment to pause and review everyone’s answer and choose a winner per round. It is a constant deluge. As the King, the answers just keep coming. As the courtier ascending the stairs to the throne, you don’t appreciate everyone’s answer until the end of a round, where some of the positive-voted answers are shown. This is a design choice that will fundamentally sway most players’ experience, as it keeps the game moving, but at the expense of some of the camaraderie these types of games revel in.
If this clicks for you, The You Quiz has some excellent design and consumer choices elsewhere. Only one person needs to own the game. Everyone else can download the Friend Pass version and join lobbies, which we found to be a smooth and easy experience. If you are playing locally in the same room, you can use a web device to access a website and play that way, like a Jackbox game. Both work well, and I appreciate the consumer-friendly approach.
Once in a game, the other major highlight is question customisation. The game owner can set a thumbs down button to move courtiers down a step if they don’t like an answer. You can also deselect individual question categories or enable children’s mode to remove anything to do with adult life, such as work, driving, and money. The killer is just like Quiplash 3 and Fibbage 3, you can build your own questions and question categories. I have a dark, often dirty sense of humour, and I usually find the default question sets for these games are funny, but not nearly as evil or dark as I’d like. Writing questions is as easy as assigning a difficulty level and writing a question, including where you’d like the King’s player name to appear. It’s the best way to tailor the game to your family or friends’ humour and extends the lifespan of the game to infinity.
Games are fast, and a round can be over in under 10 minutes. As the King swaps around a lot, the game starts to give more steps for repeated winners to clear, in an attempt to even the playing field. That’ll help The You Quiz become a family staple for the holidays. I think all the foundations are here for an under-the-radar cult classic that deserves to be in your multiplayer rotation. It just might need some time dedicated to building some questions for your own humour first. Fun.
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