Voice impression party games

A voice impression game has one rule: the controller is your throat. No trivia to know, no drawing to hide behind — you hear a voice and you try to become it, and the comedy lives in the gap between the two. It is a small genre, but a real one, with an actual history and a few genuinely different takes on the idea.

Where it started

The earliest entry most people met was The Choicest Voice, an extra minigame in Mario Party: Island Tour on the 3DS, back in 2013. One player, the console's microphone, a randomly chosen character — imitate the voice, in volume and in pitch, and five judges score you out of ten each. Ninety points across three rounds to win. A handheld scoring an impression by measurement, a decade before the genre had a name.

The impression-first game today

The Choicer Voicer is the direct descendant and says so on its own page. It kept the part that made the minigame unusual — computer judges scoring your impression — and grew it into a game show for one to four players on a couch — an early-access download for Windows and Linux from itch.io, pay what you want above $5. Its standard mode is the purest form of the genre running today: hear the line, do the voice, get judged.

Where impressions meet video

The dubbing games add the picture. What The Dub?! — paid, on Steam and consoles — has you perform missing lines over supplied B-movie clips and lets the room vote. Voxalike plays community-made video packs in a browser, and The Choicer Voicer's own Dub Mode plays them on the desktop. And PartyDub — ours, so consider the source — lets the host bring any clip of their own, with a ranked mode where the server scores each performance against the original: timing, intonation, dynamics, rhythm. The five judges from the 3DS, except online.

One honest note on the scoring idea, from the side that builds it: none of the measured games care whether you SOUND like the character. Register and microphone gain are normalised out — what is measured is the shape of the performance, because that is the part you can practise. Sounding alike is a party trick; moving like the original is the game.

Imitating sounds instead of voices

The newest branch drops the character altogether. In Mimic, PartyDub's imitation mode, everybody hears the same short sound — an animal, a machine, a shout — and everybody tries to be it at the same time. There is no vote: each attempt is measured against the original and scored out of 100, and it is free in a browser for two to ten people. It keeps the old minigame's idea — hear it, copy it, get told how close you got — and swaps the voices for noises.

Picking one for a game night

• —Judged impressions on a couch: The Choicer Voicer, $5 or more on itch.io.
• —Supplied movie clips, polished, paid: What The Dub?!.
• —Free in a browser from prepared scenes: Voxalike.
• —Your own clips, online, impressions scored: PartyDub.
• —Short sounds, everybody at once, scored out of 100: Mimic, free in a browser.

Whichever you pick, the genre's real secret is that nobody at the table can actually do impressions. That is not a bug. A room of people failing confidently at the same voice is the whole game.