Emoji Charades Review

I have had a lot of fun playing party games with friends and family over the years. And it is always great to see a new one to try, especially if you’ve been playing the same ones for a while. So when I got sent Emoji Charades, I definitely wanted to try it.

This game was provided by the developers for review.

The gameplay is very straightforward: one person is given prompts to create with emojis will everyone else guesses. You start by picking a category for the prompts, and then you’re given a group of emojis to use for each prompt. So you don’t have the entire emoji lexicon for each prompt, which adds to the difficult and the fun.

There are a bunch of different categories to choose from and many are great for us geeks! From fictional characters to games to horror movies to Harry Potter, there are many options and they are also categorized for difficulty too. And within each category, there are tons of prompts so replaying categories doesn’t get redundant quickly.

One thing I wish this game had was a way to play online with friends and not just locally. The current setup is you have your displaying device, like a TV or computer, to show the emojis for the guessers and then a phone with their app for the one making the emoji pairings. When you change who the emoji maker is, you just pass the phone to the next person. While it is really nice to only need 2 devices to play regardless of the number of people, I would still like a way to play online with friends, like with JackBox games. I may be biased slightly since I play party games with my streamer friends more than with anyone else, so it would be fun to be able to play this in that context somehow.

This game is already a ton of fun and has a lot of potential too. Getting new categories with new prompts will expand the game and the longevity of its replayability, and the developers release new packs monthly. They say this game is best with 3 or more players, but I played with just 2 players and it was still a great time.

Emoji Charades is available on Steam, and you will need the Emoji Charades free app, available on modern iPhones and Android devices, to be the controller.