That Sound Game: an aural version of charades without the obvious ‘sounds like…’

By creammagazine, July 7, 2025

Imagine a game of charades but with a little more cerebral input and possibly a lot more noise. That pretty much sums up That Sound Game – a fast-paced, interactive party game where players pick a card and make a noise to connote the word that appears on that card. All this must be done with the player’s hands behind his or her back, and with not one actual word actually spoken, just… sounds.

It’s a game that’s easy to set up, quick to get the hang of, and quite frainkly, a lot of fun.

My partner Ben, and my sister Melina and I immediately enjoyed the antics of acting out and acting up. As there were three of us, we weren’t able to form ‘teams’ and so simply played against one another, keeping score of who guessed what correctly.

The cards come in five colours – Red for Incidents; Yellow for Actions; Pink for People, Places or Personae; Green for Nature; and Blue for Objects. Say you roll the dice and it asks you to pick a pink card; on the back it might read ‘Pirate’. You might simply close one eye and growl ‘Arrrr’ and your competition might immediately get it right (or they might think you’re being a one-eyed dog, it happens). But then say your dice roll says you’re to pick a red card and the back of that card reads ‘UFO Sighting’… Now we’re getting into some serious esoteric territory.

So you see the game can be challenging but it’s also a great outlet for expression. When playing the normal, recommended way – in teams and by the rulebook – the goal is to get your team to guess as many answers on the category cards as they can in a minute.

Playing as individuals against one another, like we did, just seemed a whole lot easier – and it worked well.

That Sound Game is beautifully and compactly packaged and will make an excellent gift for that creative someone in your life. But even if your bestie is a somewhat boring person, this game just might bring a more animated side of them so it’s win-win, really.

Antonino Tati

That Sound Game is available from Games World, Dick Smith, Target, Big W, Kmart, and other game outlets, RRP varies. For more information about this very fun game, click here.