I have spent many happy hours playing this game on family game night and it has to be one of my favourite group games.

Taboo is a word guessing party game published by Hasbro in 1989. The object of the game is for a player to have his/her partner(s) guess the word on his/her card without using the word itself or five additional words listed on the card.

For example a word that might be on the top of the card is reindeer and in order to describe that word for your partner(s) to guess you would not be allowed to say Rudolph, red, Santa, Christmas etc. Then it becomes harder than you think. Automatically if you had to make someone guess reindeer you would say, "Rudolph the red nosed........" but as you can't say those words you would have to say something like, "it's an animal, lives in the Arctic, helps deliver presents" etc.

The game comes with a game board, a one minute hour glass timer with sound, a buzzer, a tray to hold the cards and the game cards with words on both side, one side with easy words, one with harder words. The words consist of nouns, people and places and are quite diverse and interesting. I do advise getting some more cards at some point as if you play as often as we do you get to know the words and can guess without it really being a challenge.

Now I have to admit we never really play by the actual rules and make up the gameplay ourselves although that is the beauty of this game. We can all sit around the room relaxing and don't have to be all sat in one place chained to a game board. We usually play girls v boys. When it's a girls turn she will try and make all the other girls guess the words. One boy from the other team will look over her shoulder with a buzzer in hand and will press it if she says any of the taboo words, if she does she doesn't get a point for that card and she moves onto the next card. At the end of the game, and we decide when that is as we can go on and on taking turns, it's the team with the most points that wins.

The game can get very funny as some of the descriptions of words can be very interesting or watching people getting frustrated when no one can guess their word is funny too. All in all this is a great fun game that I definitely recommend.