Memory is one of my least favorite mechanisms in gaming. Right behind Roll & Move, which was what defined most board games since Monopoly. But two recent games have taken memory and put it front and center in the game design to hilarious results. And what’s interesting is that each game uses memory to prove the opposite point. So today I would like to review these recent hits: That’s Not a Hat, and Wilmot’s Warehouse.

That’s Not a Hat proposes that our memory is not as good as we think it is. It asks players to hold 4-8 things in their mind, and proves how quickly we can fail at that once the cards are flipped face down in a sort of memory party shell game. In brief, each player is dealt a face up card with a simple drawing. For example, a guitar, a piece of Pizza, headphones and a skateboard. The start player then adds one card face up in front of them, and then flips the card face down and passes it to the player in the direction the card back points to. That next player must say “Thank you for the X” or question it by saying “That’s not an X.” If they accept it, they pass whatever card they have on to the next person, also flipping the card face down. 

Early on, this is easy. You follow the cards around on their journey around the table and try to keep track of what you were just handed, even when it is already face down when it arrives. But at some point, the shell game works and you forget something. Do you trust that you were just handed that piece of Pizza, or do you call the other player out. If you question any card, the card is flipped face up and whoever was wrong takes it as a penalty point in front of them. The penalized player then adds a new card to the set which is merciful as they add a card that’s face up from the central pile and don’t have to remember anything else, just yet. The first player to get three penalty points loses, and that’s the game.

The delight of That’s Not a Hat is the hilarity in how quickly we fail at this task. Early on players will receive a card and immediately forget the card that they had in front of them. Even this pause to think is pretty funny because it immediately makes the next player doubt whatever you tell them. So there’s a that can cover a lack of memory which is bluffing and turning the challenge over to someone else’s memory. Unlike a game of poker, this bluffing can be innocent, that you genuinely believe you are passing what you say you are, or just an educated guess. And at some point, once a lie has entered the system however innocently it can be even harder to keep track of the truth.

The card backs use white lettering or black and the cards always go in the same direction around the table, so there are SOME facts about the cards even once they are face down that might help you keep track, but everyone I’ve played the game with is shocked at how hard this simple task is after a few rounds. It is especially funny when players state that they are passing something from a previous round of the game. Once the cards are face down, who truly knows what’s out there.

On the other end of the spectrum is Wilmot’s Warehouse. This game proposes a memory task that sounds impossible and then helps you prove that it was easier than you thought. Here’s the setup. You and up to 6 players fill a grid with 35 tiles each of which you look at once and then place face down. You are then tasked with a separate deck of cards that contain those 35 and more to match cards to their corresponding tile. You must do it in 5 minutes or less. Sounds pretty tricky right?

Each of these tiles has some abstract art on it. Players go around the table each drawing a tile of the stack, arranged into five stacks of seven tiles, one stack for each day of the week. When a player draws a tile they show it to the other players and discuss where it should go in the grid. The starting tile goes in the center and each future tile must be orthogonally adjacent to a previous tile. But here’s the critical part. Players are encouraged to identify the tile, in spite of its abstract nature, and then fit it onto the board thematically, starting or continuing a story as to how it relates to the previous tiles and why it belongs specifically in that spot. Essentially players are building what is classically known as a Mind Palace about the tiles which then helps the group remember exactly where everything is. The center tile could look a bit like an egg sandwich, which is then above the next tile that looks a bit like a grill, and below a twirling ribbon that represents flipping the egg while it cooks.

The magic trick is that this actually works. And it works better and better the more in depth and internally consistent your story is. But the telling of the story is in itself hilarious. The connections your fellow players make and how everyone can then generally agree to and adhere to the logic that you build together is really something. For a twist, each day of the week besides Monday also has an “ideas from management” card that presents unique challenges for each day. These throw enough of a wrinkle in to keep each game fresh and challenging, and you may be surprised to hear that there are harder versions of these cards in addition to upping the tile count from 35 to 40 if you truly want a challenge. But every time I have played this game it has actually taken the group less than 2 minutes to match every item in the warehouse. Clearly what sounded impossible was actually a bit easy after all.

It has been over a week since I last played and I still remember pretty distinctly where some of those tiles were. But more than that, I remember the overall story and how we briefly became obsessed with egg sandwiches and who was making them, and the rules we made up about making them. That same tile we started with looked very much like a Tie-Fighter to me, and if we had started there I am sure the entire story would have been entirely different and equally wonderful. Wilmot’s Warehouse is not a game for everyone. One player in a recent game gritted their teeth and attempted to remember every tile themselves, not necessarily fun with that kind of pressure. But if you lean into the storytelling and treat it as a group activity it can be truly hilarious and utterly unique.

The two games combined provide opposite takes on memory, but both have been some of my favorites from this year and prove that the mechanism still has some life after all.