Frequently Asked Questions

Why, yes! In fact, we made intentional design choices for the colors of our cards! We go over more detail about a lot of the "whys" in the Card Backs and Question Cards sections below.

The designs and colors on the backs of the cards give you a quick and easy way to sort them out, of course. But we also used the designs to help you see easily which part of the game the cards are going to be used in. You may have noticed that there are certain phrases or headings in the PDF rules that are highlighted in a particular color. This matches the phase of the game that each type of card is going to be used in the first time.

• Green backed cards are always Question Cards (?), they’re the first thing you’ll use when you’re starting the game.
• Black cards are Voting Cards (✓), those are used at the beginning as well, but every once in a while can come up during the voting phases for challenges if it’s a tough call.
• Purple and pink backed cards are used during the Conversation Phase of the game. They’re your Challenge Cards (@) and Action Cards (!).
• And blue backed cards are all Trophy Cards (★), used during the Award Trophies Phase of a Question Round.

We also use the symbols on the backs of the cards in all of the references to them so that if you have anyone in your group that’s having trouble telling one color from another, they have something else to look at to help them see what kind of card they’re working with. On our professionally printed cards, this stands out even more!

Each question has a rating on the bottom that corresponds with its color. All Ages rated cards have green borders, Age 16+ Questions have blue borders, and NSFW! Questions have pink borders. This makes it quick and easy to pick the right types of questions for the group you’re playing with. If you’re having a family game, leaving out the pink cards may be the best idea. But, if your friends are looking forward to getting into some pretty unique conversations, you may want to be daring and go all NSFW!

Other information you’ll see on the cards are the set of questions that the card comes from on the left, and a card number on the right. This helps make sure that if you drop your cards or are trying to put them in order to make sure they were all put back in the box, it’s an easy way to check that.

The biggest goal with this was to make it really easy for you to flip through your questions and make the best Question Cards Deck for your game!

When we’re putting together the ratings on our questions, we ask ourselves a couple of questions:

1. Is this something that a person under 16 would really have the life experience to answer and find interesting? If no, then it goes up to an Age 16+ rating at least.

2. Is this something that would get you sent to the principal’s office or get you a ticket to HR at work? If the answer is yes, then it goes into the NSFW rating category to try and make sure that nobody gets into hot water when they don’t mean to.

3. Is this question mostly an opinion? If it is, then it gets a thought bubble style outline in the color we just picked.

Feel free to use this same idea for rating your own questions! There’s plenty of room on blank question cards to write in a rating to help you sort through your question cards quickl

“Mixxie” is the name that has stuck as the shorter version of “Mixed Company Mascot Cartoon”, and MCMC looked a little too close to Roman numeral nonsense so that name was never considered. (MC+MC = 2200 in Roman Numerals, if you were wondering). We thought it would be cool to have a mascot we could dress up and make funny faces on the cards in the game, a cartoon like character that would be somewhat easy to draw by our youngest players, and would mimic the shape of a conversation speech bubble. We are lucky to have such a talented graphics artist, Paul, to have been working with us on this project to help us bring Mixxie to life!

Absolutely! The first edition of Mixed Company will be our core game. We already have expansions planned that will easily integrate with and can be included with the core game cards. And, you’ll be able to get additional cards and ideas from the Store to print additional questions whenever you want!

If you run into a situation that the game rules don’t explain how to resolve, we encourage you to discuss and compromise to come to an agreement with the other players on how you should proceed: this situation can be its own conversation, listening, and understanding, and coming up with your own “house rules” can be fun itself. The entire point of this game is to create conversations that would not have been discussed otherwise.

Here’s the important thing! Please tell us about it! You can email our team using the contact form on our website and you can ask for ideas in any of our online communities on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit.

For the standard rules the game really works best with a variety of voices at the table. If you’re going to play the Full Rules version, you really need 3+ players to make the challenges and other aspects of the game work. We’re currently working on a variation of Mixed Company for two players, so keep following us to find out when it’s available!

Head over to our Submissions page and you can create a log in to be able to suggest all kinds of cards! Please add questions as you think of them! We love getting questions from our players, in fact around 30% of our questions came from people playtesting the game and putting in suggestions for some of the questions we have the best feedback on. We’d also love to hear what you think of other questions people have added, too, and you can vote on them when you’re logged into the page. If your question submission gets picked to go in an expansion, we’ll reach out to you and you could even get a free copy of that expansion set!

We’ll have a pack of Blank Question Cards available to order soon! Until then, you get 3 Blank Question Cards to get you started in our Print on Demand 4 Player Pack.

Based on our game play experience, we really recommend you have at least 3 people and no more than 6. With two people you can certainly use the questions to have some great conversation, but the game play is a little awkward. You can certainly use it, but it’s not recommended. With more than 6 people, we’ve found people generally get left out or the conversation breaks into smaller groups and at that point you’re not really playing the game any longer. But if your group likes large lively discussions, you can put two core sets together to have enough cards for everyone to play. Just try to make sure someone doesn’t get set aside without participating if you can. And if you find a good set of rules that work for your group, share them with us! We’re always looking for new ways to play!

It’s absolutely great to play Mixed Company with kids! We recommend the game for 10 and up for a few reasons. The game is easiest to play when you can read all the questions for yourself without having to have someone read them to you. With that in mind, we’ve chosen to recommend the game for those 10 and older. You’re most likely to find questions that younger players are interested in in the All Ages question sets. However, if you’d like to modify the cards or rules slightly to involve younger friends and family members, we’ve had some great discussions with different questions with kids of all ages.

You can play Mixed Company anywhere! We’ve played in cafes, at conventions, at game stores, in living rooms, at dining room tables… the list goes on and on. What you really want to have is a table surface that everyone can see from where they’re sitting so that they can easily read the questions and place their Action and Challenge cards. Other than that, the places you can play are limitless! The only note with playing in public spaces is you want to make sure that you respect the other people in the space with the volume and content of your conversation. You may want to save the NSFW questions for private venues rather than playing in the middle of a family event… But that all depends on your family!

Mixed Company isn’t going to be the best game to play with everyone. If you have a friend or family member that is really passionate about their opinions and doesn’t like to get into discussions with people that don’t agree with them, they may not enjoy some Mixed Company questions and others may not enjoy playing with them. Sometimes these are people that it’s great to play the game with Any Ages, What do You Think questions but not more charged NSFW, What’s Your Opinion questions, for example. Or, you could try playing with Actions so that everyone feels like they have a way to help keep the conversation moving between different participants. At the end of the day, the goal of Mixed Company is to learn more about other people around you, and have a good time together. Keeping that in mind when you’re inviting people to play can be part of making sure that it’s fun for all the players.

We have tested over 150 questions and some of them lead to better discussions than others in a Mixed Company game. You may see that there are some questions that are in one edition and not another, or some are repeated from one set to a different one if they are a great question. We’ll always keep the same numbers on all of our published questions, though, so you can see if you have multiple copies of a question from different editions and sometimes we’ll have questions that don’t make it into an edition but others numbered in that sequence do.

We’d love to get more questions with some international flavor! Right now, the game designers and most of the playtesters have been in the US, so our questions have a bit of a United States focus to them. Most of them are going to be great all over the world, but if you have some ideas for questions that focus more on your part of the world we’d love to add those, too! You can create a login to be able to submit questions through our Card Suggestion system. If we get enough questions from a particular region, we might even be able to make a special expansion pack of questions for that area!

You bet! We have some teachers that we’re working with that love using Mixed Company in their classrooms. Our Home Edition pack is a mix of All Ages and Age 16+ Questions that work well to help facilitate general discussions in a classroom setting. You might also enjoy using some of our Blank Question Cards to create questions of your own. And we’d love to hear what questions you come up with, so please add them to our question submission tool.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get the latest announcements about new expansions, questions, and more! And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter for special bonus questions and other announcements, too. We’re currently working on a new Two Player set with special rules that we’re going to have out just in time for your special someone on Valentine’s Day.

Didn’t see your question or an answer that helped here? Please, ask us! Just send us a message from our Contact Us form and we’ll be happy to answer! If it seems like a question someone else probably has, we’ll add it on the FAQ, too!