Fun and Games – A Snake Oil – Party Potion Game Review

Do you incorporate game night at your house? We have been doing a better job at playing more games lately as a family. So when given the opportunity to reiew Snake Oil – Party Potion from Out of the Box Games, we were excited!

Snake Oil – Party Potion is a fun game for 3-6 players. Though it is recommended for ages 8 and up, if you have a younger reader, this game works for them too. The game includes 112 word cards, 14 customer cards, and a plastic card holder.

I must admit, I was intrigued by the name of the game and wondered what the kids would think. Of course my 5 year old didn’t care what it was called, he thought it was cool that it was called Snake Oil – Party Potion because the title had “snake” in it and sounded cool. My daughter was interested in why the game was named what it was. We discussed where the term “snake oil” came from and discussed the history behind it.

In case you don’t know, back during the days of the Transcontinental Railroad (the 1860s), the Chinese workers used snake oil to relief sore muslces. Soon, it was the “cure all” and everyone wanted snake oil; therefore, everyone wanted to SELL snake oil and get in on the lucrative side of snake oil. This, of course, led to fake snake oil being marketed. Therefore, the term “Snake Oil Salesman” was born and used to describe someone trying to sell you something questionable. Thus the title of the game 🙂

It didn’t take long to catch on how to play the game, which was nice. And the game takes only about 30 minutes to complete, which is also nice. This gave us a chance to play the game more than once to give different players a chance to be the customer. The idea behind the game is to pick 2 words to make a “product” and then “sell” the product to the customer. The customer chooses a customer card to find out what kind of customer he or she is – like firefighter or nurse or camper. The players then try to “sell” a product to the customer. For instance, if the customer is a firefight you might try to sell him “mist chair.” The customer chooses which player made the best pitch. The person who had the best pitch get to keep the customer card from that round. The game continues as each player takes a turn as the customer and the winner is the player with the most customer cards at the end of the game. It was actually pretty fun and we each got a chance to “sell.” It definiately made us laugh!

We got to “sell” things like galaxy uniforms and spider rugs. The kids loved the funny pairing of words. Even though my son doesn’t read yet, he caught on quickly and participated in the fun. He would pick the cards randomly and ask us to read them to him and then try to sell the product. My daughter, a solid reader, really enjoyed combining the words and coming up with creative products to sell. We all really laughed with this game.

Snake Oil – Party Potion can also be used as an add on to the Snake Oil game for ages 10 and up since the cards are all different allowing even MORE fun with the Snake Oil game.

This is a great family game and would be fun for adults to play as well. I will probably break out this game at some of our family get togethers this holiday season. We look forward to playing this game time and again.

You can purchase Snake Oil – Party Potion from Out of the Box games for $14.99.

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