I am always looking for new games and this month I bought three new ones to play over the holidays while the kids are home from college.

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The Chameleon is made by Big Potato Games, a small indie board game company from England. I did not realize they also made another family favorite of ours – Linkee. (Review on Linkee coming soon!)

We played the game on Thanksgiving and our group of five included three college kids and two adults who are old enough to have college kids. The game recommends 14+, not because it is adult themed, but probably because of the strategy.

To play the game, the Topic Cards (Fairy Tales in the picture above) goes in the center. The dealer shuffles 1 Chameleon card and (in our case of five players) 4 code cards and deals them out face down.

The dealer rolls the two dice. The players all refer to the code card in their hand to see what Fairy Tale they will be describing. The Chameleon will pretend to look back and forth between the card in their hand and and Topic Card.

In the case of the roll in the picture above, the players will be describing C3 on the Topic Card. In our example in the picture below, the players will be describing Pinocchio.

Here’s the catch – you can only use one word to describe the Topic. So in this case, you don’t want to make it obvious to the Chameleon by using the word “nose”.

If you used “boy” for example, the Topic could be Peter Pan, Jack in the Beanstalk, Gingerbread Man or Pinocchio. You might even get away with that description for Hansel and Gretel or Beauty and the Beast, too.

The Chameleon’s mind is racing as everyone says their one word, hoping that he won’t make an obvious mistake by saying “princess” or something vague like “happy”.

The hard part is when you are the Chameleon but it happens to be your turn to go first. You have to be vaguely convincing that it is not you.

When everyone goes around the table saying their word, the players then guess who they think is the Chameleon. This is a lot of lighthearted debate. You need to keep your poker face straight if it’s you.

The player with the most cards needs to turn over their card to reveal if they are the Chameleon. If you guessed wrong, the Chameleon did their job and blended in. The real Chameleon gets 2 points.

If you guessed right, then the Chameleon has a chance to score by guessing what the Topic was – in this case, Pinocchio. If the Chameleon guesses right, he gets 1 point. If he guesses wrong, he gets zero points.

We stopped keeping score after a few rounds and just played for a set time limit. It was just fun to see how creative everyone was.

So would I recommend this game? Absolutely! It was quick to learn, easy to set up and everyone said they would play it again. That’s a win!

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