We approached this game from Exploding Kittens with some trepidation. It looked like this was going to be a game predicated on players shouting at the top of their voices: doubtless fun for some but not usually what we're primarily looking for in a board game. We were in for a pleasant surprise. You can expect some loud voices in the excitement of play but Really Loud Librarians really isn't about shouting; it's a word/trivia party game for two teams of players (or, at a push, just a head-to-head between two players) designed by Ken Gruhl and Quentin Weir where the teams are trying to come up with words associated with the category on a card.
That sounds like a familiar idea, and indeed it is. But what separates Really Loud Librarians from other similar word association games is the novel board design. Twenty of the letters of the alphabet are jumbled and arranged around the scoring track in a race circuit (there's no Q, U, V, X, Y or Z). The standee representing your team doesn't just hop from one letter to another around the circuit, they are pulled along in a chain of rings that cover three of the letters at a time. When coming up with words associated with the category on your card then, you can call out words beginning with any of the letters visible in any of the rings. The extra twist here is that you move the chain forward every time a correct word is called out, so the letters are going to constantly change all the way through your team's 60-second turn.
The game comes with a a 60-second sand timer and a good supply of around 60 double-sided category cards, and each one has a different category for each of the teams. It's the ever-changing requirements tho' of the moving chain that elevates Really Loud Librarians from the many similar word and trivia games: the better your team are at coming up with words, the further their standee will be pulled around the board, but the further and faster your standee moves the more mental agility will be demanded of your team to switch to different starting letters for their words.
There's a bit more to it because, increasingly through the game, tiles are added to random letters that offer the opportunity to earn bonus tokens for each word that starts with that letter. The points for these can potentially be worth more than the points for winning rounds but you only get to score your bonus tokens in rounds that your team wins...
Tho' there's more to it than most similar word and trivia games, Really Loud Librarians is still intuitively easy to play, so suitable for gamers and non-gamers alike and pretty much immediately playable straight out of the box. And as a party game for two teams the only upper limit for the number of players is the practicality of everyone having a good view of the board: it's very playable with teams of just two or three players but you shouldn't have any problem accommodating teams of five or six players.