How well do you get along with the people living under your same roof?

Do you know what makes them happy?

And can you provide that?

Well, even if you can’t help out in that regard, you can at least try to make them happy with their decorating goals in a fun cooperative board game by Floodgate Games – Decorum!

Decorum is a cooperative, hidden information game where players try to decorate their shared home in a way that makes everyone happy. The catch is that you don’t know what’s going to make the other players happy!

You must deduce what types of things make them happy by what changes they make to the decorations in the various rooms during their turns. Hopefully you’ll all be able to figure that out and arrange things just so before the game ends or you’re not going to survive in the same house for long.

 

How to play Decorum

A game of Decorum involves playing through a scenario where each player has unique decorating objectives for the house. You can choose which scenario you’d like to play or simply play them in the prescribed order by level of difficulty.

There are 20 scenarios for 2-player games and 10 scenarios for 3 or 4 player games. Each scenario is played over a series of rounds where players adjust the various house decorations and try to meet everyone’s personal happiness goal.

Once you’ve chosen a scenario to play, each player takes a set of condition cards (by color) which they’ll keep secret. Players then set up decorations in the house as described on the Setup card for that scenario.

There are 3 different types of decor (lamp, wall hanging, and curio), 4 different styles (modern, antique, retro, and unusual), in 4 different colors (yellow, red, green, and blue). Plus the walls of each room will be painted one of 4 colors. The Setup card will show which items start in which rooms.

On a player’s turn, they will make a single change to the house. This may include:

• Adding an object to an empty slot in the house.
• Removing an object from the house.
• Swapping an object already in the house for one of the same type.
• Painting a room
• Passing (only if their happy conditions are all fulfilled).

After making the change, if all their personal conditions are met, the player says, “I’m fulfilled.”

The types of conditions can be anything from certain colors or types of decor in certain rooms or sides of the house and/or any combinations of such. Here are a few types of examples (not actual conditions on the cards because we don’t want to give the specific conditions away, but you’ll get an idea):

• The house must contain more green than any other single color.
• The house must contain all four styles of wall hangings.
• The bottom floor must not contain any retro lamps or curios.
• The house must not contain and duplicate items.
• Each room must have exactly one empty space.
• The house must contain exactly 1 blue room with each other room going clockwise blue -> yellow -> green -> red.

Once the active player is done with their turn, all other players can make a comment about their level of satisfaction. They can’t say specifically what they like about the change though. They must keep their comments to a general statement about whether they love it, hate it, or are indifferent.

After all players have taken a turn, the round marker is moved one space forward. After specific rounds in a game, players will have a Heart-to-Heart or House Meeting. During this stage, players each chose one of their condition cards to share with one other player.

Once players have digested their newly received information, play continues with the next round.

Players keep taking turns and going through the various rounds until either the house reaches a state where every player is completely fulfilled or the last round ends without success.

 

Can the whole family enjoy Decorum?

Decorum is a fantastic board game for families to play together. As frequent visitors to our site will know, we love cooperative board games. We love how cooperative games have us working together to beat the game. And Decorum is a well-designed, challenging, and fun cooperative game.

We’ve played at every player count multiple times and absolutely love the fun challenge. Each scenario has unique conditions for the players, and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of trying to figure out what the other players need to be fulfilled. Because inevitably, we’re going to change things that mess things up for each other.

As you discover the types of things the other players are trying to do, you’ll have to rethink your own conditions and how you may be able to meet them in a different manner. It’s quite the fun challenge.

We had planned to review Decorum prior to Valentine’s Day because Decorum is such a perfect game for couples. The game plays so well with 2 players as you each try to read the other player’s mind on what they’re trying to do. Plus, the round marker and some tokens are heart-shaped.

We played through the various scenarios by level of difficulty how they’re organized in the game box. And as we did so, we really liked how the combinations of conditions got more complex.

One of the potential downsides of cooperative games is if there’s a single player who tries to tell everyone else what to do on their turn to “solve the puzzle of the game”. The great thing about Decorum is that such a situation isn’t even possible because no one has all the information!

There’s no way at all to tell others what to do on their turn. Everyone is left to their own choices about what to do on their turn.

The only thing mom doesn’t like about the game is the passive aggressive comments we make after each player’s turn. For example, “oh boy, that really makes things ugly” or “wow, I really thought it was better the way it was.”

Those comments arise mainly because you can’t state any specifics about why you do or don’t like a particular change. For example, you can’t say “the bathroom looks better with red” because that’s too specific about the room or colors. Such negative comments with their accompanying vagueness are what feels off-putting to mom. So we adjust our comments to not sound “mean-spirited”.

That being said, she still absolutely loves playing the game. We all do!

 

How does Decorum score on our “Let’s Play Again” game meter?

If you haven’t guessed, Decorum scores super high on our “let’s play again” game meter. After our first play, we were hooked and enjoyed playing night after night.

The big question in a cooperative game like this – with set condition cards – is how replayable is it? Once you’ve played through all the scenarios and discovered all the conditions, can you replay them?

In our house, the answer is still, “yes”. With so many scenarios in the game, sure we have some vague recollection of which conditions were in which scenario. But the variety overall is such that we’ve gone back and played scenarios over again and still had fun figuring it all out again.

If you’re looking for a new, fun, cooperative board game for your family, we highly recommend Decorum.