Preview: Keep Your Sanity Is a Party Game of Charades, Personal Facts, and Quarantine

Roll the die and follow the results in a light party game about keeping your sanity and getting to know one another. Keep Your Sanity is currently on Kickstarter.

Gameplay

There are three stacks of cards. Act, Chance, and the double-sided Sanity/Debt cards. On your turn, you take the die and roll it. On a one, you and the player with the most Sanity cards each roll the die. If you roll higher than them, you swap your Sanity/Debt cards with each other.

If you roll a two, you take two Sanity cards (or if you have two Debt cards you return them to the stack). If you roll a three you take a Quarantine card and place it on top of your Sanity/Debt cards. While quarantined you cannot receive, lose, or swap any of these cards with another player. On your next turn, your only action will be to return the Quarantine card.

If you roll a four, you must roll the die again and give away that number of Sanity cards to one or more players (depending on the result), or if you rolled a six you return them to the stack.

Rolling a five causes you to draw an Act card. You have roughly two minutes in which to act out the prompt on the card. If another player guesses it, you both win two Sanity cards.

Finally, rolling a six means you must draw a Chance card and follow what it says. This may cause you to simply gain or lose Sanity cards, or perhaps you might tell a particular fact about yourself in order to earn Sanity.

The game ends once someone reaches twenty Sanity cards or when the Sanity deck runs out. The player with the most Sanity then wins.

Review

Keep Your Sanity is a light little party game that combines several elements. You’ve got some charades there, some hypothetical questions you have to answer, and you’ve got random facts about each other. Turns are quite fast and it’s a speedy little game.

The Act cards are the longest turns, but those engage everyone at the table. It’s a nice touch that for the more difficult Act cards, extra Sanity cards are awarded. This feels like a nice balance and a feature that would be nice to see in other games with charade-like mechanics.

While elements of the game are rooted in the current time, with several of the cards harking back to events that occurred in 2020, there are several cards that are more timeless, making it a game that could be played in the future as well, so long as you took out a few of the prompts.

A lot of the game does come down to luck. A roll of the die might give you Sanity cards or it might take them away, and you don’t have control over the results. It’s a light party game, so this won’t bother all players, but it was a disappointment to us. We would like to see at least one interesting choice on any given turn.

Overall, Keep Your Sanity is fast and easy to play. There’s something rather relaxing about its mix of card types and relaxed rules. Check it out on Kickstarter and see for yourself.

Pros: Scoring in the Act cards, relaxed gameplay, mix of party game mechanics

Cons: Heavily luck based

Disclosure: this preview is based on our evaluation of an unpublished prototype of the game, which is subject to change prior to publication. While a modest payment was received to expedite the review process, our thoughts and opinions expressed here are honest and accurate.