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The morning bell is ringing and school is about to start – but some cheeky children are skipping school! Can you and your fellow teachers correctly deduce who’s made it to class and who’s playing hooky?

👥 3 to 5 players
⌛ 45 to 60 minutes
🧠 14 years+

Gameplay overview:

In Hooky, each player is a teacher with their own class of children in their hands. There are 26 children cards, and coincidentally each child’s name starts with a different letter of the alphabet. Before the children go to class (i.e. cards are dealt out), three are put secretly to the side – these are the ones playing hooky! 

Players take it in turns to ask another player a 5 letter word, and the asked player must say how many times their class members appear in the word. All players then use this information to try and deduce which children are in players’ hands and which children are playing hooky.

For example, Player 1 asks Player 2 the word “DANDY”. Player 2 has child D and Y in their hand, so they answer 3 (because repeated letters still count!). All players hear this information and use it alongside knowing what is in their own hands.

On your turn you can also choose to reveal a child from your hand, to sneak a peek at a child in someone else’s hand – hopefully a child you didn’t already know about. And in addition to the hooky children, there are a couple of stragglers hanging out in the playground who arrive to class late – these are revealed in the first few rounds as the game progresses, giving players additional information. 

At the end of the game, players earn points for each correct hooky child they guessed in rounds 4, 5 and 6, as well as points for correctly guessing children in other players’ classes.

Our first impressions:

• Hooky is brilliantly simple yet an absolute brainburner – in a good way! I love deduction puzzles and Hooky really scratches that puzzle itch for me.

• There are a lot of different things to think about when forming questions and interpreting answers. When asking someone, the challenge is coming up with a word that will actually give you answers without potentially revealing too much of your own hand. And it’s really satisfying when one new piece of information can cause a chain reaction and help you unlock the locations of multiple kids or reveals more paths of inquiry

I love deduction puzzles and Hooky really scratches that puzzle itch.

• We liked the artwork and the simplicity of the design – the children are really cute. I did think that older kids or teens might have made more sense playing hooky though!

• The sheets provided are brilliant, but there’s an initial learning curve in the first game as you figure out how to record information. Some of it is intuitive and you pick it up quickly, some of it is learning what works best for your brain. There isn’t dedicated space for everything (e.g. I had times I knew that of two letters, 1 belonged to a specific player and the other was hooky, but I didn’t know which was which yet), so I just found my own way of noting it down.

• There was downtime between turns as everyone processes new information and puzzles it out – like I said above, sometimes one clue can unlock some downstream deductions or questions. For the most part everyone is doing the same thing so it doesn’t feel like waiting around, but worth noting because it’s a good chunk of the playtime.

• Hooky is linked to a nonprofit called Friends of Aseema, at the wishes of the designer, James Miller. There’s an absolutely beautiful story behind this and I recommend reading about it on the BGG Designer Diary blog by Christine Biancheria. Unfortunately James passed away unexpectedly before Hooky was published, but it’s lovely that his legacy lives on supporting this charity initiative. It’s also worth noting that a lot of the art was created by students and alumni who had been supported by Aseema.

Final thoughts:

Hooky is deduction puzzle meets word game – think Cluedo meets Letter Jam. It’s simple, it’s brain melting, and it supports a great cause.

Hooky is deduction puzzle meets word game – think Cluedo meets Letter Jam. It’s simple, it’s brain melting, and it supports a great cause. And I’m always excited to come across a new deduction game in the logic puzzle genre (rather than social deduction, something that I’m terrible at!). If you like games like Turing Machine, Digit Code, or Decrypto, you should definitely give Hooky a go!