What do you sell a snowman?
How about a puddle protector for those embarrassing spring moments? Or a pocket flamethrower to eliminate the competition? Or maybe an ice brush in order to stay well groomed?
In the world of Snake Oil, you play intrepid hucksters who have something for everyone and your job is to sell sell sell.
The original game of Snake Oil is certified Major Fun. It’s not hard to see why. It’s a party game in which one person plays the rube… er… customer and everyone else is a sales person with something unusual to peddle. The customer reveals a card that tells who they are (a snowman, a lion tamer, an acrobat, etc…). The sales people have a handful of cards that describe things. Their job is to take two of the cards arrange them into the name of some new item and then make a sales pitch. Once all the pitches have been made, the customer chooses a winning product.
This is not an anonymous game like Apples to Apples or Menu Mash-up. The fun is in the inventive combinations as well as the reasons players give for why their product is best. The more ridiculous the better.
Snake Oil: Party Potion and Snake Oil: Elixir can both be played on their own or can be mixed in with the original as an expansion. Party Potion is written with younger audiences in mind (it is listed for ages 8+ as opposed to 10+ for Elixir and the base game) but we found that it was every bit as engaging and fun as the others.
If you have Snake Oil and are looking for more items and customers to enliven your game, these will do the trick. If you are new to the game, any of the three are a good place to start.
So hitch up your wagon, pull out your best soap-box, and get your bull-horn polished. There are suckers born every minute and all of them are in desperate need of beard freezers, table clips, and a package of sock bacon.
3 – 6 players. Ages 10+ (8+ for Party Potion)
Snake Oil: Party Potion and Snake Oil: Elixir were designed by Jeff Ochs and Patricia Kaufman and is © 2014 by Out of the Box Games.