SNAP Review – Secret Identity

Anitra! You don’t know who I am!

It’s a secret.

I… Everyone who watches these knows who you are. We do this every week.

But you don’t know who – THIS IDENTITY is.

THAT kind of secret identity. Well, yes, that’s the game.

This is a SNAP review for Secret Identity.

Game

Secret Identity is a 3-8 player game designed by Johan Benvenuto, Alexandre Droit, Kévin Jost, Bertrand Roux, and published by R&R Games in the United States. This casual party game takes around 45 minutes to play.

Art

Let’s start with the art that’s in Secret Identity. There isn’t really much of it, except on these clue cards. We’ll explain how those work in a minute.

But the graphic design is neat, with these magnetic flip boards and this slot to hold your clues.

I’m not sure how I feel about keys representing secret identities, but it ends up working well enough.

Mechanics

Speaking of keys, magnets, and clues, let’s talk about the mechanics of Secret Identity.

To begin, each player takes a player board, or “personal safe”, their voting keys, a scoring cube, and ten clue cards.

Put the scoring board and the mystery keys, that’s the gold ones, face down in the middle of the table and put an identity at each of the eight numbered arrows around the board. This is true no matter how many people are playing.

Each player takes a mystery key, looks at the number secretly, and inserts it into their safe – face up – at the key icon. Make sure nobody sees it when you close the magnet! That is your secret identity.

Then, each player uses up to three of their clue cards to give clues about who they are to everyone else at the table. They can put them on the “is like” or “is not like” side of their safe.

Then, using their voting keys, everyone chooses who they think each other player is, and gives them the corresponding key. You’ll want to hide this number, too, until the big reveal. Keep putting these keys face-up into your safe, just like the Mystery key.

Once everyone has voted, reveal the votes! Players get one point for a correct vote on someone else, and one point for every correct vote on their secret identity.

Discard all the identity cards, return all the keys, and do it again. There are four rounds in Secret Identity.

But wait! There’s more! You only get ten clue cards total! So you’re going to have to figure out how to distribute those for your clues – No over-clueing! That last round can get pretty interesting. And difficult.

Whoever has the most points at the end, wins!

Expectations

So Anitra, let’s talk expectations. What did you expect from Secret Identity?

You told me it was fun. I was kind of unclear at first how this game played, so I hoped it didn’t involve hidden goals or, like, social deduction.

I wondered if it had anything in common with The Key, those games from HABA – when I first opened the box and there were all these keys. I liked the finish of the player boards, but I couldn’t really figure out how all of this stuff came together.

Surprises

But I think we were both surprised with this game. What about you, Anitra?

This was a lot of fun! The clues people come up with get really really interesting – it reminds me a little bit of other guessing games like Similo or So Clover, where it helps to look at what all the options ARE to determine what the clues are eliminating or pointing you towards.

I had a lot of trouble seeing the symbol cards from across the table, though. Both the text and the symbols are just a little too small. This is just a hard game for old eyes.

I definitely like guessing games like this where your choices are constrained. It really forces you to be creative to give everyone else the right clues despite not having a lot to work with.

We found out that when playing with our kids, sometimes people didn’t know who the identities were. So, we’d just check around the table as we put them out, and if anyone didn’t know an identity, we just discarded it and used the next one – there’s a pretty good stack in the box. And that actually worked really well for us.

Recommended?

So Andrew, would we recommend Secret Identity?

I really like that this game is a net positive all the way around. There is only shared success in Secret Identity, which makes it a fantastic family game. This one isn’t good for the date pile, but it’s definitely good for a feel good game with a little bit of silliness and some laughter.

As we mentioned, it’s easy to adjust this to fit your family – the pool of identities is visible to everyone, so you can make sure you only use characters that everyone at the table knows.

The only downsides are that the keys can get a little cumbersome, and with a larger group, some people – like you said – might struggle to make out the small text and the symbols.

So yeah, we absolutely recommend Secret Identity. In fact, we’re going to give it 4½ bushy mustaches out of five.

And that’s Secret Identity, in a SNAP!

Find Secret Identity on Amazon, direct from R&R Games, or at your local game store.

---

The Family Gamers received a copy of Secret Identity from R&R Games for this review.

This post contains affiliate links, which do not change your price, but help support The Family Gamers.

SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?