(Part of a series, reviewing games I played in September 2013 at That Board Gaming Thing.)

Designer: Stephen Glenn
Publisher: R & R Games
Players: 3-8
Playing time: 50 minutes
Age Range: 12+

(Not a picture of gameplay)

Pluckin’ Pairs is a very simple party game. You start by laying out eleven cards with images on them. Then every player has 90 seconds to write down five pairs from the images, with the last card as their outcast. You can use any criteria you like: it could be that the paired images start with the same letter, or have similar colors, or be related in subject. However, as you’ll see, you don’t want them to be too obscure…

Then, to score, you go around and see how many other people have the same pairs as you do — in which case you and they get as many points as the number of players that picked those pairs. The exceptions are if every player picked those pairs, or only you did; in both cases you get nothing. You can also score points for your matching outcast images. You can keep playing for several rounds and in the end highest score wins.

This is a game best in a large group, similar to Apples to Apples. I think if you don’t have such a game, you couldn’t go wrong with this one — it’s fun and it’d probably be even better with a group of people who know each other well. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of party games, and don’t see the need for more than what we already have, but you are a fan or don’t have a lot of games like this one, you can’t go wrong with this (but get Apples to Apples first).

Final verdict: Borrow.